15 months update

Miracle Baby is 15 months old now.

Sometimes it seems years ago that she was born and sometimes she does something so baby-ish and I think "relax, she's not going off to college just yet!"

QUIRKS: She has a funny new happy dance which looks like marching in place really fast. Cutest thing ever. She likes to sing EIEIO all day long over and over. In her carseat she dances by swinging her top half from left to right and kicking her legs. She LOVES dogs, but mostly to look at, not pet. She loves to wear grownup shoes and try to walk in them. She has recently gotten to where she can play by herself for long periods if it's something engrossing, so I can cook dinner or whatever next to her, which is really freeing.

THE 2 MOMMY THING: We have been surprised by how much preference she has shown for me (the bio mom). It actually only surfaced a few months ago but it just gets stronger and stronger. This has caused my wife, and therefore me, much angst. She believes it's the result of nursing, but I think it would have happened anyway. We have consulted other 2 mommy families, books, and even the pediatrician, and all said this was normal, innate, and temporary. But it doesn't make the "rejected" parent feel much better. I know how much it would kill me if I was DW. We do our best not to indulge it. When I hand her off, screaming, to my DW, I play it cool and do a brief happy goodbye and then walk away not looking back. We are working on getting her and DW more alone time together. But it just so happens that DW works odd hours and I am alone with the baby a lot, which doesn't help with attachment issues. One downside is that she is literally on my hip a lot (or in a soft structured carrier on my belly) and I get to where I need my space at the end of the day. I get more exposure to the toddler tantrums and attitude, and eventually my patience wears thinner than DW's. And it also aggravates my lifelong back issues. So DW and I look forward to the end of this phase. Have you experienced it?

WORDS: MB has always been funny with language. She talks a lot but it's mostly babble and words she says once and never again. If the pediatrician asked me how many words she says regularly it would be.... mama, baby and eat. But that doesn't represent how much she talks!

TOYS: She is a huge lover of dolls and stuffed animals, which surprises me because I wasn't. She always has to have something to cuddle with in her arms. Recently she decided she no longer wanted to play with toys in the car, but to veg out and listen to kids music and just have down time. So we respect that.

SLEEP: We have been moving her bedtime closer to 8pm so she won't wake up at 5am anymore. It's helping. Today she woke up at 6:40 which seems like a miracle.

TEETHING: She's been cutting her top molars which is just as bad as everyone always said it was.  All the teething advice ever given to me is useless on MB. She refuses to use any teething ring, frozen washcloth, frozen bagel, etc. Basically we just suffer through it, although she did do a lot of comfort nursing the past few days.

NURSING: On that note I am proud to say we are still nursing, usually upon wakeup and when I get off work at 5. We share a car (and have since 2008), so MB and my wife pick me  up at work and we nurse in the parking lot. She has only been on one 24 hour nursing strike, which about scared me to death! Other times, especially weekends, she nurses much more than twice. I hope to go till her second birthday because she needs all the nutritional benefits so much this year. One reason is that she refuses to drink cow's milk (or any milk except with chocolate in it, which we vetoed), which means she needs the fat, protein, and other nutrients she would have gotten from that.

FOOD/NUTRITION: Food and nutrition have been something I've put a lot of time, thought and energy into since MB started solids.

I planned to never be one of those moms with a picky eater who ends up feeding the kid nuggets and mac and cheese because "it's all he'll eat!" Joke's on me because I do have a picky eater, despite my dutiful attempts to offer her a wide variety of healthy foods the minute she ate solids. But I'm not giving up this battle yet! I found a huge resource in weelicious.com. She taught me to chop veggies and other healthy stuff into smoothies, muffins and pancakes, and now I always have some of those on hand for MB. She eats a vegetable muffin pretty much daily. Right now it's spinach, sweet potato and strawberry muffins. She loves them. I make them with whole wheat flour and very little sugar. You can sweeten them with vanilla and spices without adding sugar, so they still love them!

One challenge with MB has always been that what she loves one day she REFUSES the next. So we buy her "staples" and then they go to waste. It's very frustrating. She loved spaghetti for a while so I made her homemade veggie packed tomato sauce and now she refuses that. Etc etc. Some days it's exhausting trying to outsmart a picky toddler and make sure healthy stuff gets down her gullet. But I keep at it.

I have tried very hard never to push her to eat when she is not hungry. My family has a history of weight issues and I'm trying hard to help her have a healthy relationship with food. So we taught her a sign for "all done" and when she uses it, we respect that, although sometimes it feels like she is living on air!

She is 21 lbs, the same since 12 months old. She has been around the 50-60 percentile for a long time and I think has now fallen below that, but I am trying not to worry because I've been told kids this age really slow down with the weight gain, and I've been told kids won't starve themselves.

This is super long so I'll update more later!

Blog Status

Hi Everybody,

Sorry that I haven't written for 3 months. It wasn't that I was too busy. It's that I have been thinking a lot about blog privacy ever since my family was so thoroughly attacked through this blog during our adoption attempt. Every year it seems the internet gets less and less private, including on "the debil," and I know I will need to answer to MB one day about what I posted about her online.

I have loved this blog and this community and I hate letting it go, hence 3 months of indecision. At one point I decided to end the blog after MB was born, but it's been 15 months now and I haven't yet. I don't want to lose all you wonderful people but I want to avoid all the crazies out there, so I'll keep thinking on it.

I may delete all past posts/pics and make this blog text only (boring, I know).
I may delete the blog altogether.
I may figure out how to do a password protected blog, which I think I cannot do in Blogger?
I'm sure all mommy bloggers struggle with this, so your thoughts are appreciated! Thanks, and happy holidays,

C

Induced lactation

This is another one of those topics that I wish I could have found more info on, so I thought I'd share what we did in the hopes that it might help others navigating the world of lesbian or adoptive parenthood!

Induced lactation is something I researched years ago when I thought I'd be the non bio mommy. In the end I decided that the stress and time involved wasn't worth it to me and I decided not to do it. A few months after I got pregnant, my DW decided she wanted to do this. E has always felt a stronger urge to have a bio/physical connection with our child than I have, and it's been very hard for her to not be the one pregnant or to know if she will ever be able to carry a baby. So she decided it would help her a lot emotionally to be able to breastfeed the baby. Luckily for us, since I would be breastfeeding too, DW didn't need to worry about how much she produced, as most women do with induced lactation.

E says that blogging is not her thing, so she asked me to convey her story to you. She researched protocols and decided to follow this one: http://www.asklenore.info/breastfeeding/induced_lactation/gn_protocols.shtml.
The protocol calls for:

1) Meet with your doctor and explain what you want to do. Obtain a presciption for a high progesterone birth control pill such as Yazmin. It must have high progesterone in order to best mimic the breast changes of pregnancy that prepare you for lactation. Begin taking birth control 4-6 months before the birth and continue until 6weeks before birth. DO NOT TAKE the sugar pills in the packet. (Make sure Dr. writes Rx to say "no placebo, 28 day supply".)

2) Obtain an Rx for Domperidone, a medication that is supposed to be for GI problems but they found it makes people lactate! It is only available in the U.S. through compound pharmacies. We found one in Asheville, NC. Ours costs $120 per month. Continue taking until your milk supply is established after the birth.

3) Begin using a breast pump every 3 hours, for at least 5 minutes each time, 6 weeks before the birth.


How did it go?

E responded really well to the drugs, producing drops on the 2nd day of pumping! Her supply started to increase but when her renewal Rx of domperidone didn't arrive in time and she missed a couple days, it disappeared! She was never able to recover from that. She added fenugreek and blessed thistle to her regimen but it was a LOT of pills to handle, 3 times a day, and it was hard to keep up.

When MB was born, E nursed her immediately, and continued every few hours. She tried various breast pumps, nursing shields, and a supplemental nursing system. She never produced more than a few drops. Eventually she tried to feed these to MB with a dropper, but the process of collecting them, transferring them, etc wasted the few drops and MB got almost nothing that way. After 2-3 weeks of this and with the expensive domperidone Rx needing to be renewed, we decided to save the money and stress and have her discontinue her efforts to nurse/pump. She went cold turkey and experienced a couple days of moderate discomfort, and that was that.

I know she hated to give up that bond with MB, but I'm sure it helped them bond with each other in the early weeks and that it benefited them both. I think E is glad she doesn't have to always wonder whether she'd have been able to nurse, so that makes it all worth it. However she does have anxiety now about whether she can successfully nurse any biological kids she may have, mostly because of flat nipples. I have encouraged her to do non-nutritive/comfort nursing but so far she has not seemed too interested, and that's OK. She and MB bond in other ways now, and I think E feels more and more like her mom every day (I'm still getting used to the idea myself!)

How to Claim the Adoption Tax Credit for a failed adoption

One of the main reasons I began this blog was to share the sort of information that I had such trouble finding online about adoption/infertility/same sex families. This is one of those things that so little is known about, yet it's absolutely crucial for some of us to know!

If you go to any website at all connected with adoption, you will be BOMBARDED with encouragement to take the Adoption Tax Credit. Many adoption agencies say things like: "Well our fees are $20,000 but the tax credit is $13,000 so it's like getting a baby for $7000!"

So not true.

First of all you have to pay that $20,000 up front. This was our problem -- getting lines of credit in this horrible economy! Then you cannot claim the credit until after the adoption is finalized (if it ever is) which is easily a good 2 years after you spent the money and in our case have been making 2 years of debt payments on that adoption/failed adoption.

Then, until this year the credit rolled over each year if your tax liabiliy didn't match the amount you were claming the credit for. Since same-sex couples like us have to file as singles (*&^%%!!!) and we don't make a lot, this meant that our credit might expire before we could have claimed it all!

This year it's fully refundable (yay!) but this provision was included in Obama's health care law which everyone and their brother is trying desperately to repeal (sigh). And anyway, every year they threaten to make the adoption tax credit go away or be drastically reduced so it is NOT a guarantee that it'll be available to you.

Then if you're lucky like us and do an independent adoption where no one will refund any of your money if it fails (some agencies will roll over your fee to the next match) and then it fails -- you are left with tens of thousands of dollars of debt payments and no baby (yay!).

So for 1.5 years we faithfully saved receipts and prayed for Jan 31 2011 to come around so we could file for a credit for that god-awful failed adoption that devastated our financial lives. January 2011 rolls around and THEN we learn that because the adoption never finalized we can only claim our 2009 adoption expenses this year (a fraction of what we were expecting). Well, crap.

So we call the IRS and ask if we need to send any documentation when claiming for a failed adoption, since the Form 8839 is woefully silent when it comes to failed adoptions. They said no.

So we filed, praying we'd get every penny because thanks to M this is the only way we can pay for my hospital bill and (unpaid) maternity leave when the baby is born. And then like the rest of the adoption community this year -- we got our refund minus the adoption credit part.

A few weeks later we got a letter saying they might ask for more documentation but not saying what. A little bit later we finally got a letter saying they wanted a copy of our homestudy (if the adoption was not finalized), explanation of all expenses, and receipts or cancelled checks for all expenses. Fair enough. But that would have been great to know last winter when we were preparing our taxes. Might have saved us months in waiting for this refund. So in the next week we will send all this to the Tax Examiner person listed in the letter and pray some more.

In all my research, I have only heard of one person getting their credit for a failed adoption (although it's supposed to be perfectly OK to do this), and she had to go to the Tax Advocates to get it. If we don't get this refund, I don't know how in the world we'll pay for the post-delivery hospital bill and my (short) unpaid maternity leave. I hate the thought of returning to work 3 weeks post-partum. So send us good thoughts, please.

So that's our experience thus far with the adoption tax credit. If only our lawmakers realized how very important this credit was to adoptive families. This credit should be protected at all costs.

Cloth Diapers

So, I've been researching cloth diapering for over a year now, and I thought I'd share where we are with that. First, I had no idea cloth diapering would be so complicated! There are a tons of different kinds to buy and methods to use, depending on your baby's age and shape, your washer model, your budget, etc. Then when you buy them you wash them a few times to make them absorbent. Then you keep them in a diaper pail (usually with no lid) and wash them every 2-3 days. Washing is a complicated process -- most people recommend a cold rinse/soak, a hot wash with a little detergent, and then 1-2 rinses after that. Then, with the kind I want to get, you air dry them, which apparently takes a long time. There are special diaper creams to use and you have to buy pants a size bigger. Every now and then you have to "strip" the diapers to make them less smelly and more absorbent.

But I still want to do it. I've always hated the thought of all those bazillions of nasty disposable diapers filling up our landfills and not biodegrading, ever. Multiply that times all the babies in the US - It's disgusting! It's important to me to cloth diaper, even though opponents say that when you account for the water, electricity, and detergent you use, it's not more planet friendly. I think it still is! And it can be cheaper, too!



The diaper I have settled on, at least for a starting place, is the Bum Genius 3.0. It's an all in one diaper which means it goes on like a disposable. For exhausted, sleep deprived mamas dealing with working full time and trying to finalize an adoption while dealing with a baby that may have some colic or other special needs (from drug exposure), I think we need a simple option like this! However, we understand that her daycare may refuse to cloth diaper. I don't like that thought, but I can't do anything about it, so we may have to buy Earth's Best disposables (the greenest disposables I've found that aren't super duper expensive) for daycare. Also, for the first few weeks, when we are staying in a Nevada hotel room with a newborn, waiting for the Interstate Compact to come through, there is NO WAY we can handle cloth diapers! So we will use disposables then. We need to not push ourselves over the edge! But I hope it doesn't last long before we can handle cloth! It makes me feel like we are really doing something tangible to help the environment.

Why didn't you adopt from foster care?

This Post is From Becky Fawcett at An Infertile Blonde
5/4/10

"Why didn’t you……
When I speak of my adoption journey and the frustrations and costs involved —OK complain about process and the costs involved….. Inevitably someone always says ”Why didn’t you adopt out of foster care? It’s free and it’s easy.”

At these moments I take a deep breath. First of all the person usually saying this to me is not an adoptive parent for one. And secondly…..they have no idea what they are talking about.

Nothing is as easy as it seems.

I recently read an article in Adoptive Families Magazine (www.adoptivefamilies.com) by Jeff Katz. It’s not easy. There are many obstacles that the system presents to hopeful adoptive parents that prevent these amazing kids from getting adopted into the homes they so deserve.

I don’t get it.
I can’t explain it.

And this article “Impassable Borders” by Jeff Katz (no link provided) just confirmed that the system is the kids worst enemy.

He states:

“For many years I ran an agency in Rhode Island that recruited families to adopt children from that state’s child welfare system. Like many such organizations, we had a “waiting child” feature on a local television station.

After one of our TV spots showed a seven-year-old black boy named Justin, I got a call from a woman in Massachusetts. She was a lawyer, and her husband was a doctor. Both were black. She told me that they had been considering adoption for several years. They saw Justin and were moved by his story. They prayed. And they decided that they would adopt this child.

But they couldn’t. Rhode Island could not legally provide a homestudy to a Massachusetts family. And Massachusetts would not use state resources to prepare a family to adopt a child from another state. This situation repeats itself, every single day, in America. The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to adopt a foster child across state lines in the United States.”

Mr. Katz goes on to say that “When a pediatric nurse in a small community says she wants to adopt a child with spina bifida or another developmental birth defect, she may wait years before one is available in her community. Meanwhile, 50 miles away, in another county, a child waits.”

I still don’t understand.
Maybe I never will.
The system clearly needs to change."

I included Becky's post for the hundred thousand people who have tried to santimoniously tell me that adopting from foster care is the solution to all my problems. It must be so nice for them to know that they have the perfect answer! But it's an entirely different thing to practice what you preach, and I bet most of them don't.

Let me explain how this goes in real life.

We always wanted to adopt an older child from foster care. We still do. Just not as our first child. These children need special care and deserve experienced parents, not bumblers like us. So we tried to conceive a child, to experience the newborn phase, get our feet wet before turning to an older, special needs child.

Cue several years of hell, emotionally and financially. Lots of crying, hoping, waiting, agonizing, medications, and research.

We didn't want to spend ten years trying to conceive like other people we knew. We just wanted a child and didn't care about biology. As a lesbian I always knew there was a chance I wouldn't be genetically related to my kids anyway. So we looked to adopt an infant. And yes, we immediately applied to adopt from the state, as well as to an agency and independently. The state told us up front there were no babies available for years at a time, but we wanted to try everything in the hope something would work out.

Cue almost another year of hell. I can't tell you how many doors were slammed in my face because we were a same sex couple. How many agencies proclaimed a DIRE NEED for adoptive parents of African American children, then ignored my inquiries or told me they weren't that desperate. We went back to the state and said we'd be happy to take a sibling group of an infant and a child up to age 5. No luck. Finally, we began many conversations about fostering to adopt. Here's what that looks like:

Call the county DSS. Leave a message. Get no response. Keep calling.
Get asked to attend an orientation, usually during work time.
Attend 30 hours of parenting training about stuff you already know, if you're like me and research everything. Get told your $3000 private agency homestudy isn't good enough and you have to do another one with the state. more interviews, physicals, home inspections, references, etc.

Hire a fire inspector to come to your home and pronounce it safe.
Lock all medicines, cleaning supplies away even if they're on the top shelf.
Complete more paperwork than you ever thought possible.
It gets lost a few times and you complete it again, sometimes paying for things twice like child abuse clearances.
This process takes a year, according to many friends that have done it!

A YEAR later, get approved and start waiting. Months go by. Then you get call that they're bringing you a five year old right now, with no time to shop for a 5 yr old instead of the 2 yr old you decorated a room/bought clothes for. You're told it will be for a week. Then it turns into months. The child has reactive attachment disorder and appears to hate you. She's angry, throws things, bites you, runs away (I'm using real life examples here). Completely understandable from what she's been through, but are you prepared to handle ANY issue that may arise when the child gets to your home, with no advance preparation/warning?

Then just when you get her settled in and she's sleeping through the night and not hitting kids at school anymore, the state calls and says she has to go back to her parents right now. Her birthday is tomorrow and you've planned a whole party, which is now cancelled (this happened to someone I know). She goes back to her parents. Two weeks later they bring her back to your doorstep, with emotional and physical scars. It takes months to get her to feel secure again. Repeat cycle for years. You waited this long to be a parent, and yet you don't know if she'll ever be yours, right up until the date it's actually finalized. After she's been in your family five years and you've cleared tons of legal hurdles and she calls your mom Grandma, you're about to finalize the adoption. Then her second cousin comes out of the wood work and says she wants the child. You get no say. A week later she's gone. You never get an update on how she's doing.

Repeat until one of these children actually becomes yours forever.


I have the GREATEST respect for foster parents. Honestly I don't know how human hearts can withstand this much. Where would we be without them? But this is why we have not yet adopted from foster care. It is not right for all families, and I don't know whether it will ever be right for us. Perhaps when our hearts have healed a little from all that we've been put through on this journey, we could contemplate embarking on something like this. But for now, I'll take a private infant adoption, thanks. It's a tough enough road as it is. And no, I don't feel the least bit guilty about it. I look forward to the challenge and reward of adopting a foster child one day. But right now, this method is what is right for my family.

Change to this here blog

I created this blog last year to aid us in finding a birthmother in an independent adoption. Things have changed many times since then, and we are still trying to add to our family, but as the day seems to be getting closer and closer, I decided to change this from an "adoption/TTC blog" to a "family blog." Enjoy!