Thursday was a Weird Day

So everything had begun to really set in by Thursday. My goodness, I must have been happy and then sad and then happy about a thousand times that day!

I got up in the morning determined to rid myself of the baby stuff I have collected over the past 6 months. After all, we won't have a baby in the house for at least 18 months (a year after Kendi and Caynan get home is the earliest we will go for foster parenting). So I sat upstairs all day pulling things out of drawers, seperating which items were given to me by which friend, which clothes I would donate, which clothes I would keep for when we foster, etc. It all made me a little sad, but I was doing okay. Until! Until I came to the first two little baby outfits I had purchased in Februrary for the mystery baby we were going to adopt. Oh how I loved those outfits and dreamed of dressing our baby in them! But I cried a little and put them in the box to be saved for future foster children.

I know there was no hurry to clean the baby stuff out, but I really wanted to! I was so excited about getting our house ready for OUR family, OUR kids! I mourned the imagined reality I had of us having a baby, but at the same time was celebrating the real reality (can you say redundant? "real reality"!) we are about to have--four wonderful kids ages 3 to 6!

Sometimes throughout the day I found myself getting all excited imagining our four kids running through the house, making my floors dirty and my ears ring from the noise of their little voices! But the next moment I felt panicky at the thought of HOW exactly I am going to do this and meet all of their needs! Of course, I know we can--I have so many friends with 4 or more children and I know the Lord called us to do this. I suppose it's not a bad thing to have just a bit of anxiousness about how I'm going to do everything--so that I can plan to the best of my ability.

I was particularly concerned about how I would meet C and K's needs while mom and I are in Ghana. Attachment parenting means that *I* or Eric need to do *everything* for them for while, but Eric won't be in Ghana with me. I have a good friend who just went through a similar adoption experience (who is also an excellent "attachment mom") that assured me it's okay to do whatever I need to do that first week we're in Ghana--we can start more appropriate attachment parenting the next week when we're in the U.S. Boy did I need to hear that! =-)

I went to bed Thursday night with so much excitement. After all of this time (going on 3 years of prayers for me) we finally know who our children #3 and #4 are. Everything feels so content in my heart.