Well, as of this past Thursday, we are officially licensed foster parents. We met our case worker, the adoption coordinator and case worker and the intake worker Thursday morning and we are ready to go. Now we just wait for a call to tell us we have a placement. It could be tomorrow or it could be in a month, I’m hoping for sooner rather than later, but I’m sure you knew that already. We will keep you updated as things happen!
2009 has flown by and we are already into 2010. Jonathan and I did quite a bit in 2009 and through its ups and downs, we had a great year. We started off the year like every other year, a birthday bash with my family and the Medlin’s (My other family) to celebrate my dad’s and Bob’s birthdays.
In February Jonathan and I went on our first cruise to Cozumel and Progresso, Mexico with our friends Josh and Shalyn.
Jonathan and I completed our first bike race, Tour Dallas, with our friend Todd. We had a great time and hope to do it again this year.
A few months later, we rode in another bike ride, Mesquite Rodeo Ride. We attempted this one but about 10-12 miles in I was done, my heart couldn’t take anymore.
We took a visit to the Ft. Worth Botanical Gardens on Memorial Day Weekend
Our good friend Tami got married to Michael in May and Jonathan and I were the photographers.
In July Jonathan and I went on another cruise to the Bahamas with my parents, his parents and his sister and brother-in-law. We had a great time with everyone!
In August we put our house on the market so we can move closer to both our families. We are hoping to move to the Forney or Rockwall area. Hopefully our home will sell in 2010 and we can move closer to our families.
In October we started the process to become foster parents so we can adopt through CPS. We had to do about 32 hours of classroom training, we filled out 1000 pieces of paperwork, done drug screenings, got our fingerprints done with the FBI, and have completed our homestudy so we are just playing the waiting game now. For our homestudy we had to have the babies room set up with the crib and everything so we moved our guest room into the office and set up the babies room.
Throughout the year we went to a few of my nephew, Jake’s, soccer games and spent time with my niece, Brooklyn.
We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with both of our families and rang in the new year with some friends. We started 2010 the same way we started 2009, a birthday bash with my family and the medlins.
We finally got an updated picture of all the Turner-Medlin “kids” and their significant other.
So here’s to the New Year and a happy and joyous 2010. We anticipate 2010 to be a big year for us as we bring a little one into our home and hopefully adopt a child this year. I wish all of you a wonderful new year and hope your dreams and goals of 2010 come true!
We have been so busy the last few months with the foster care training and getting ready for the homestudies and bringing a little one into the house that we didn’t really have much time to do a Christmas card like last year. So we’re sending you all a Christmas card via my blog! We want to wish each and everyone of you a very Merry Christmas and hope you get to spend your time with family and loved ones this holiday season!
Things are a changin at the Blundell house! Changing for the better, of course. We are well on our way to becoming foster parents and that much closer to adopting a kiddo. More and more, raising a child seems to be an immediate reality and not some nebulous event in the hazy future.
We have two weeks left of pre service classes, we have to get all the million papers turned in, get our fingerprints done with the FBI and then one of us has to get his drug test (I already did)…after all that is done we can schedule our pre service visit and homestudy. They told us that there is a very good possibility we could be licensed with the state by January!! The agency told us we needed the room set up with the crib and all for the pre service visit so we went out and got our crib this weekend.
We decided to use the room we had been using as a guest room for the nursery so we had to combine the guest room and office. So we moved the bed into the office and cleared out the other room to complete the transformation.
Since we are still trying to sell our house, we didn’t want to paint the room so we found these wall decals that just stick to the wall – there pretty awesome! They were pretty easy to put up, just a tedious task as each of the leaves had to be individually placed…and for a perfectionist like me, that took some time.
I also re-painted and re-stained a small chest of drawers I had in my room all growing up so we can use it in the nursery. And after that, repainted it…long story short, I bought flat paint instead of semi-gloss, not sure what I was thinking when I bought it but it’s ok now, the world is all good again.
It’s very strange to think that within the next couple of months, we could have a little one in the house. But it could also take a while before we get a placement so we are trying not to get toooo excited. Who am I kidding, I can’t help but be excited!
This has been such an emotional time in our lives (well, mine anyways) and I feel sad, angry, disappointed and every other emotion that comes along with infertility, but at the same time I am excited, happy, joyous, hopeful and thankful at the thought of bringing a child into our home and family that we will care for and love at the time they need it most.
We are supposed to read 3 books that the Baptist Home recommends and then write a “book report” on what we learned from the book. The books we are reading are good books and bring up topics you may not think about in adoption. One of the books talks about how the whole pre-service time prior to an adoption (or in our case, foster care) is like a pregnancy. They call it “pregnant by adoption”. The author says “If I were six months pregnant, people would be drooling over me, but since I’m expecting by adoption, I get so much nonchalance, shock and plain old rudeness. Adoption is sometimes treated as not being ‘real’ (and, of course, with all the hopes and fears, some of us hold back our excitement) therefore, it would be helpful for those around us to understand our need to be treated as if we are expecting, or pregnant by adoption.” This is very true…if I were pregnant, I’d have a big belly and people would just know that we were expecting, but because I don’t have that, people don’t know or get excited about it. Don’t get me wrong, the people we are close to have shown their support and excitement. A few months back when I made a comment about us adopting on facebook, I got several comments from people, but my favorite comment and the one that meant the most to me was from my friend Amy…all she said was “How exciting, I didn’t know you were ‘expecting'”. I don’t think she’ll ever know how much that simple comment meant to me! I will say, it was kind of strange going into babies r us to buy our crib and nursery stuff not having a baby at home or knowing one is on the way. But it is an experience that mothers and fathers-to-be get to go through, so why shouldn’t we?
As we are preparing to bring a child into the home we are doing the same stuff most parents would, setting up the nursery, getting excited and thinking of what the child will be like. But for us, there are some differences from those who are actually going to give birth. We have to go to parenting classes, we have to have the fire marshal come and do a health/fire safety check of our home, we have to have someone come interview us and ask us all kinds of personal information to make sure we will be “fit parents”. We also have to think about some of the struggles that come with adoption. Adoption has positive and negative elements, none of us wants to acknowledge the negative, painful side–which is, loss. But the truth is, the very act of adoption is built upon loss. For the birth parents, the loss of their biological offspring, the relationship that could have been, a very part of themselves. For the adoptive parents, the loss of giving birth to a biological child, the child whose face will never mirror theirs. And for the adopted child, the loss of the birth parents, the earliest experiences of belonging and acceptance. To deny adoption loss is to deny the emotional reality of everyone involved.
We are very excited and can’t wait to see what the next few months will bring. We just ask for your continued prayers and support as we wait for a little one to join the family!
No, I’m not pregnant! We have been doing infertility treatment for a while now and nothing has really worked. Basically I just don’t respond to the medications. This is our last month of just medications, next month we will probably start IUI treatments. I’m not going to go into what all that entails, but it’s the step in between fertility drugs and IVF. We decided that we are not going to do IVF simply because it’s too expensive. We can’t justify spending $30,000 on a chance that we’ll get pregnant, when we can spend that much and adopt several kids (I’m not saying we’ll adopt several kids, I’m just using it as an example). IUI, which we are going to try isn’t cheap but it doesn’t even come close to the cost of IVF. We are doing treatments for a little while longer, but in the mean time we are getting the foster to adopt process started.
We have decided to do a foster to adoption with CPS. Basically we would get a child that is in CPS custody and foster them for a while and then adopt them. You have to foster a child in your home for 6 months before you can legally adopt them. We started filling out the adoption application this weekend and our orientation is next week. The first week of november we start our foster parent classes and then after that (mid December) we’ll complete a home study (wherever we’re living at the time- hopefully not here) and then we’ll be certified to accept a child. There are a million and 1 papers to fill out, get notarized and send in. Plus inspections by the fire department, health department and all other kinds of stuff we’ll have to do but it will all be worth it in the end.
Now for the most common statement I have heard since telling people we were starting the adoption process…drum roll please……..”Now that you’re doing this, you’ll get pregnant”. To be honest, this statement never really bothered me until now…now everytime I hear it I cringe and take offense. I’m sorry but if it hasn’t happened in almost 2 years, why would it happen now!! Statistics show that a whopping 5% of couples who stop trying to get pregnant and adopt get pregnant after they adopt…the same as people who simply stop treatment for infertility. I’m not saying it won’t happen, I’m just saying there is a very slim chance that it will. And, the next most common statement or question I get since telling people we are adopting is…”what will you do if you get pregnant?” What do you mean, what will I do?? We’ll be thrilled! I for one, am not going to just sit around and wait 5 years for us to get pregnant. If we adopt and then get pregnant–GREAT, we’ll just have 2 babies. On the other hand, if we get pregnant while we are going through the classes and beginning of the process, we may put it off for a while, but we’ll cross that bridge when/if we get to it. We will adopt though, just maybe not in the next 6 months.
As thrilled as I am about the possibility of adoption and bringing a baby into our home – at the same time, I’m also sad, angry, disappointed and a part of me feels like I’d be giving up on the possibility of us having our own biological child. But I can only handle the emotional roller coaster we call our lives right now for so long. The tolls the treatments are taking on me physically are getting a little too much to handle as well.
Stay tuned for updates on the whole adoption process – I promise I’ll keep you updated.
2 years ago we bought our first home:
We spent time painting rooms, doing landscaping, and all kinds of other stuff:
But in the end, it’s time to move on.
We finally did it, we put our house on the market today…It’s for sale! I love our house, I really do. I don’t love the location of it. It’s not that I don’t like Red Oak and the area, it’s fine, just not for me. Both Jonathan and I work in downtown Dallas and both of our families are about 45 – 50 minutes away. For most people, that’s plenty close….for me, it’s too far. I want to be able to call up my sister-in-law and in 15 minutes we are meeting for lunch or going shopping or whatever. We spend so many weekends in Dallas and do a lot in the Dallas area after work that I feel like we live in Dallas but sleep in Red Oak. Here has been my dilema…Jonathan would prefer to stay here or even further out than we are. I haven’t really pushed the issue of moving before now because I didn’t want to take Jonathan away from the area that he wants to live. He is a part of a Wednesday morning mens group with our church and if we moved he wouldn’t be able to keep going to that…and I didn’t want to be the reason for that. So the dilema comes in when I have to decide, do I stay in a place that I don’t like, an area that I don’t have but a few friends, and always wanting to be closer to my family. Or, do I try to talk him into moving and ultimately pull him away from his friends and church that he loves. So after a lot of thinking and going back and forth it comes down to the fact that I was so unhappy I had to talk him into moving but at the same time feel guilty about it because I know he doesn’t really want to move and I’m taking him away from friends. (It’s not like we are never going to see them again, we won’t be moving that far)
One day, somehow, we are going to have a family and I want to be close to our family when that happens. Another factor in our decision is that we weren’t sure we would get what we needed/wanted for our house. We don’t know what will happen with the housing market in the future….if we wait, will it get better or worse? After talking to a few realtors and seeing what other houses are going for, we decided to go for it. So for the next few months or longer (hopefully not that long) we will be living in a house that is neat and tidy and ready for potential buyers to view it at any moment! Anyone wanna buy a house?!
Jonathan and I had a great time on our cruise to the Bahama’s last week. I wasn’t ready to get back to the real world this week at all! I never know which one is worse, the week before or after a vacation.
We met Jonathan’s sister and brother in law and our parents Monday morning and headed to the airport to fly to Florida. Our ship left from Port Canaveral, Florida and we headed to the Bahamas. The first day we stopped at CocoCay, an island near the Bahamas, and went to the beach all day.
We had a good time just relaxing by the ocean. The next day we were in Nassau and went snorkeling that morning and then had a tour of part of paradise island.
After snorkeling we headed back to the ship to change and eat some lunch with the padres. Then we all headed to Atlantis and walked around. It was a pretty cool hotel but not sure if I’d pay $200+ a night to stay there though.
After Atlantis we walked to the Straw Market which is basically a big flea market. Later that night Jonathan and I decided to climb the rock wall. It was a lot of fun. I thought I would feel the motion of the boat while climbing up the wall but I never did.
Overall we had a great time but we are done with beach vacations for a while. We hope to go to Scotland/England for our next vacation!!
Every little girl dreams of the day she will become a mother, and every newly married couple dreams of the day they will hold their first child in their arms. For some, those dreams are shattered when they face the challenges of infertility. There is nothing harder then to hear you have infertility and may never get pregnant. What is even harder to hear is that someone else is pregnant; while you are happy for them you can’t help but wonder why it can’t be you. People will try to offer support and words of encouragement, but if they have never experienced infertility they don’t know how it truly feels. It makes it harder to hear someone say “You’ll have a baby when it’s meant to happen,†or “Stop trying so hard and you’ll become pregnant,†as if it’s that easy. Let me tell you, month after month of no positive pregnancy tests really takes a toll on you emotionally.
I’ve struggled for a few months with whether or not I was going to post this, simply because we weren’t ready to tell people and also because in the back of our mind, we just knew that it would happen and there would be no point in telling everyone.
Well it hasn’t happened and it is a very real reality in our life right now.
Jonathan and I have been trying to extend our family for about a year and a half now (surprise!).
And as a small disclaimer, here comes a lot of information that you probably wished you never knew about me. I’m sorry, but it’s a part of the process so get over it. 🙂
Anyway, I have always had sporadic cycles and my doctor said it wouldn’t be a big deal until I was trying to get pregnant, so we never did anything about it. I went in to see my doctor for my annual visit, about 9 months after we had started trying, and she did some blood work to see if anything was abnormal. Voila, there’s my problem! I had increased prolactin levels from a prolactinoma on my pituitary gland (a small benign tumor). The tumor doesn’t really cause a problem until you are trying to get pregnant and then you can’t because you don’t ovulate. Now, here comes the technical part… Prolactin is one of many hormones produced by the pituitary gland. It is primarily responsible for milk production during lactation. With increased prolactin, there is an increase in the hypothalamic hormone dopamine which tells the pituitary to stop releasing prolactin. In some cases the dopamine can’t reach the pituitary gland (like from a tumor). When that happens, there’s no signal to suppress the secretion of prolactin, and the pituitary continues to release it. When prolactin levels rise, the hypothalamus manufactures and releases more dopamine in an effort to stop prolactin production. This increase in dopamine has other effects. In particular, it suppresses the production of the hormones that promote release of FSH and LH. This in turn, leads to a drop in LH and FSH, causing low estrogen levels and therefore no ovulation.
Now that wasn’t too bad was it…still with me?
So we discovered I had a pituitary tumor and my doctor started me on a miracle drug to “shrink†the tumor and bring my prolactin levels back to normal. Well within two months, the tumor had shrunk and my levels were back to normal, YEAH! But we still haven’t been able to get pregnant. My doctor thought that’s all it would take but it didn’t. I have been to many office visits with her, tests, blood work, you name it and she can’t explain why now… it’s basically just unexplained infertility.
Everyday woman get pregnant, it’s what our bodies were designed to do, but for some reason my body is broken in that department. There are many different treatment options available each with their own side effects. I am still on the medication to keep my prolactin levels low but I have now started a fertility drug that will hopefully help as well. There are many undesirable side effects from the medication that I would love to live without but I’m willing to do anything, within reason, to have a baby. So over the next few months I will have many more visits with my doctor and many more blood tests.
Now granted, I said I would do anything within reason to have a baby because Jonathan and I have talked about it and we will only go so far to try to get pregnant. We can’t justify spending thousands of dollars on treatments that still only give us a “maybe†chance of getting pregnant. We would rather spend that money on adopting a child that is in need of a family but we will cross that road if and when we get there. Either way we would like to adopt a child at some point in the future, but that’s another story for another time.
So basically what it boils down to is this, after months and months of disappointment and heart ache we need some prayers… prayer for strength, patience and understanding. Personally speaking, it’s taking a toll on me emotionally and physically, because of side effects of the drugs.
As a final thought, I know everyone will want to call, e-mail and ask us if we’re pregnant yet or how things are going (we get that enough of that as it is – without anyone knowing all this background 🙂 ). We appreciate all the thoughts and prayers and know you mean the best when you ask, but if you’ll promise not to bombard us with questions, we’ll do our best to keep you posted and let you know if anything changes.
I will never give up the hope of becoming a parent, whether it’s our own or through adoption, one day it will happen!
My memorial day weekend started early….it was Thursday at about 2:00 when I went home sick from work. I was just work out and could feel a sinus infection brewing…I’ve done good, a whole 4 months without a sinus infection, Wahoo! I guess I broke my streak this week because on Sunday morning I woke up with full fledged sinusitis. Needles to say we didn’t do much of anything Sunday, I pretty much just layed on the couch all day. Despite feeling horrible Jonathan and I did manage to have a good weekend. Saturday we headed to Terrell for my nephew’s soccer tournament and then back home for small group at our house.
Our small group was just that, small. It was just me, Jonathan and Preslsey, so we headed to Home Depot to get some stuff to plant a small garden. Jonathan got some jalapenos, cucumbers and tomatoes and I got some potted flowers to put in the back yard.
Monday Jonathan and I went and had brunch at Ihop…I know, we go all out! Then headed to Ft. Worth to the botanical gardens for a while. We had a great time at the gardens and of course took some photos. It wouldn’t be a day in the life of laurie and jonathan if we didn’t take pictures. 
And that was the extent of our weekend, not extravagant but it was perfect for us!
My nephew, Jake, started playing soccer this year. He had his first game this past Tuesday, which was his dad’s (my brother) birthday. So we all went out to watch Jake play his first game and then went to dinner for Brad’s Birthday. Before the game the team did the whole, hands in and on 3 yell “Cobras”:
Jake did a great job of chasing the ball and even made a goal!!
He had a chance to play goalie as well and did a good job of keeping the ball out of their goal.
I can’t wait to go to another game!