2 years/1 month

I have now been Jude’s Mum for a month. It has been a surreal month of packing and preparing to leave. Most surreal of all has been living the day to life 4,791 miles away from my child. This has been the first month of my motherhood, eery quiet like the stillness before a thunderstorm. Meanwhile you rush like mad to shut up all the windows…

Today also marks 2 years since I first found Bulgaria. Since I first settled on adopting from Bulgaria. My all-night internet research fest. 2 years ago I could barely find Bulgaria on the world map. By that point, Jude would have been a tiny infant living in the baby orphanage in Plovdiv. I simply had no idea that she even existed.

And here we are today. 48 hours until take off. Within 36 hours after that I will have her in my arms.

I won’t lie. I’ve lived a lifetime to get here. I remember my goal when I started this blog: Adoption blogs were the single most helpful thing I found during the process so I was passing the torch.

To all those still waiting: I promise you. I Promise You. I PROMISE YOU. Stick with it. I know how hard the waiting is. Believe me, I KNOW. I still have to get through tomorrow. It is frustrating, it is agnony. There are days that will literally drive you mad. You will cry. It is hard. But you WILL GET HERE. You will. When some people say you get to the end of and it didn’t seem that bad: THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. It was that bad. You earned your stripes. You remember every endless day. But (after several centuries of relative time) you do eventually get here.

And here is every bit as awesome as you think it is.

Reality strikes (again)

This is becoming an unhappy trend. In the week leading up to Trip 1 I was in a car accident. This time…well, read on.

I would like to start out by proclaiming that I have a mouth like a pirate. Is it the most ladylike thing? No. Is it a part of who I am, yes. In the next week a very bizarre string of events will occur. Starting Monday, I will develop a speech impediment. This will be stage 1 of me censoring myself around Jude. Stage 2 will likely happen about 2 weeks later, for some unknown reason I start sounding like Sarah Palin trying to swear and it is annoying as hell. Stage 3 comes into play about 6 weeks in. My vocabulary takes a giant leap forward in evolution and most of you will need to start Googling words. The final resting place is a place of compromise. Typical pirate mouth away from children, Shakespeare in their company. But never, Oh never, in a hundred million years did I ever think ol’ pirate mouth would save my life.

At 2:00 this morning that very well may be exactly what happened.

Let me explain.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m too excited. Yesterday, work got the better of me and I was utterly exhausted. I passed OUT! And was sleeping fabulously until about 2. I woke up to a knockdown drag out catfight. Cats have not been pleased with the packed luggage so there have been some spats. I thought this was just an epic one at 2 AM. So I sat up, perturbed (to say the least) that I had been woken from such a sound slumber and yelled (with the gusto of a biker chick who has chain smoked for 400 years): WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU FIGHTING AT 2:00 IN THE FUCKING MORNING WHILE I AM TRYING TO FUCKING SLEEP?

And then said felines knocked over a metallic object somewhere in the kitchen. And stopped. And I fell back asleep.

Except that when I got up nothing was knocked over. And shortly thereafter I discovered the real reason for the 2 AM kerfuffle.

Someone tried to break into the house through the basement window (beneath the kitchen). Me as hellbeast might have prevented from getting further than it did (they never made it in).

Enter city police officer involvement. In the week before we leave for Bulgaria
For the second time in my life. Not an awesome trend.

But it puts life in perspective. Once again, life delicately reminds me that it does exist outside of this adoption. Thanks for that.

(Less than) 1 week to go

I spent the majority of yesterday packing the rest of our things. There will be a few last minute things that will be going in the carry on the morning I leave, but I am, for the most part done packing.

This week is all about wrapping up and signing out at work. There will be lots of changes there before I return in August.

I went to WalMart. Damn. Took a full 20 minutes to find sunscreen. Then once I finally found it there were two people embroiled in a screaming match about the Banana Boat brand. One of them was named Linda. Everyone in the vicinity of the sunscreen area learned this. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out a plan to get to the Coppertone without being noticed, so I can move on to everything else I needed to do that day. WalMart. Gotta love it.

I keep worrying that I am going to forget something. Like something vitally important. I have made checklists and whatnot to try and prevent this, but over the past week almost every morning I wake up at 2/3 in the morning with the feeling that I have forgotten something but I have no idea what it is.

So what is left to do before I go? A trip to the bank this week. And a few emails. And that is it, really.

1 week from now I will be in Bulgaria and hopefully less than 12 hours away from being back together with Jude.