taking risks. and scoring big on craig's list.

Greetings and happy Monday/Columbus Day (worst 'holiday' ever) to lucky people like my banker-husband who get to celebrate such non-holidays. Bah. I'm not bitter at all that he gets to recover from our exhausting weekend by having a nice day off, while I'll be trying to stay awake at work. NOT BITTER AT ALL.

I feel like I should apologize for not blogging on Friday-- Thursday was for sure emotional and depressing, and then when I didn't write on Friday, I felt bad because apparently that worried people (based on your very sweet emails and inquiries)! The truth is-- I felt MUCH better about things on Friday, but we were up bright and early Friday morning packing up the car and hitting the road to drive to North Carolina for a family wedding weekend. There was no time for blogging, although I did my best to respond to emails while in the car. This is the first time I've actually touched a computer since Thursday...I mean...three days of no-computer? I didn't even know it was possible. So anyways- I'll be working hard at catching up on emails and such today...but also I'll actually be at work, so it may take awhile to actually catch up.

First things first: we are still pressing on in our desire to adopt Ellison. I struggle with how many details to share here, and for much of an over-sharer as I am at heart, I really want to protect her family, their situation(s), and their right to privacy, so I hesitate to say much even though I know I've kept everything anonymous and what-not. I just wouldn't feel good blabbing. But then that also makes it hard to explain why we make certain decisions or whatever. So anyways. Sorry if we're light on the details and back stories here. But anyway, at this point, both the birth mom and Matt and I very much want to proceed with the adoption as planned. We all recognize that there is a potential for bumps in the road later on. There has always been that risk-- this isn't really anything new. It's a risk that right now Matt and I are willing to take. Adoption and biological father laws in Georgia (and probably every state, but I can only speak for Georgia) are complicated and there are any number of possible scenarios that could play out with ours. For a quick primer, I located this little document with handy FAQs. I have no idea how legit this web page is or anything about the source, but the answers in the FAQs seem consistent with what we've heard from our lawyers and other people in the adoption field. Questions number 4, 10, and 13 (in the "birth father" section) are particularly relevant in our situation.

SO. We proceed forward with much prayer, a freshly-sobered attitude, and try desperately to cling to hope that this could work out. I am so thankful for all of your promises of prayer and support-- the peace that we felt once we woke up with Friday morning was such a HUGE contrast to the non-stop ugly crying of Thursday...I certainly can't attribute that kind of peace to anything we did. So keep it up, partners. ;)

Skipping over my planned wedding ridiculousness recap in favor of a fun story from last night. But I'll get to the wedding later, because guess what? I WAS THE WEDDING FLORIST. Yeah. True story- and there are pictures!!

 So ever since I started thinking about/planning our nursery (when we initially prepped the room and I made curtains, almost 2 years ago), I've had this great plan that when the time came, I wanted a turquoise dresser (that would also serve as the changing table). I wanted gray walls, a white crib, and above all- a turquoise dresser. That is fact #1.

Fact #2 is that shortly after I made the curtains, I did the #1 Smartest Thing Ever and carried a swatch of my curtain fabric over to Lowe's and proceeded to grab little paint chips that matched the colors in the curtains. It's not that I planned to paint anything all of these colors- I just thought it would be a handy way to always have the room colors with me, in case I ever found something and I was wondering whether it would match/clash with the curtains. I keep them in my wallet and regularly pat myself on the back for coming up with such a genius plan. They are SO handy. You can see me holding them in the pictures of me at the fabric store last week-- they worked perfectly for making sure the fabrics we bought for the crib bedding will match the existing curtains at home. 

So anyways. Although we're still trying to adhere to The Plan and not buy anything much, the fact remains that if I want a turquoise dresser, that's going to require a little more thought and work than just sending someone out to pick it up later once Ellison is home. So I've been scouring Craig's list, yard sales, and the like in hopes of finding a suitable dresser that I can paint my desired shade of turquoise. I figure buying it and doing the manual labor now will be highly preferable to trying to attempt the same thing with a newborn strapped to my chest. High five for these smart mom instincts now, right? Right.

So last week I saw a plain wooden dresser on Craig's List that would have been perfect for my paint and nursery. I contacted the seller and was sad to learn that it had sold almost as soon as she'd posted it. She did say, however, that she was going to be posting a similar dresser the next day, only it would be blue. If I was interested, she'd be happy to send me the photos before she posted it.

DEAL. Sounds great. I'm not really interested in blue, but I can paint over that just as easy as I can paint over brown wood.

She didn't end up contacting me til Saturday night. By then I'd figured that she'd forgotten about me and sold it on CL. But then she emailed me and there were pictures. The dresser was actually really cute, and the 'blue' was really more of a light turquoise. I mean, from the tiny picture on my phone, it actually looked kind of perfect...but then...no. Surely not. BUT I was interested enough to ask if we could come over last night, after we got home from Charlotte, and take a look in person. I mean, the price was SUPER right ($60). The dresser was a great shape. And the paint...well, it could always be painted over again.

So we drive out to her house last night. After arriving she took us out to the garage. In the weird shadowy lighting of the garage, I gaped at the dresser. It looked just like the lighter turquoise paint chip I've been toting around for two years!! Seriously?? And not only that...but it was a really cute dresser! She had just finished painting it-- so this wasn't someone's old nasty blue dresser that'd been hanging out in a garage for a decade. This was a freshly-rehabbed, cutely-hardwared dresser that looked basically exactly like what I'd been envisioning for my nursery!

I pulled my paint chips out of my wallet. I laid the light turquoise one on the dresser.

BINGO.

If they weren't the exact same shade, they were like...well, whatever the next closest thing would be. The seller looked at me and said "what is the paint chip for?"...and I said, "well, it's the color I was planning to paint the dresser. But it looks like you already did." We were both a little giddy and ridiculously excited about the 'coincidence.' She'd just picked the color on a whim. I've been carrying the paint card around for two years.

Of course.

So of course we bought it, and it fit into the back of our hatchback like it was born to live there. But then it turned out that the seller and her husband were both really friendly and warm people. We got to talking about the adoption. Turns out they'd gone through several years of infertility too, before having their sons. We're of similar age, both couples living in small towns...and apparently both wives have a thing for painted furniture filling their garages. So we ended up hanging out with them for about an hour, and before we left we'd all swapped phone numbers and made tentative plans for hanging out in the future!! And she gave me a baby gift!!! Holy cow. She just happened to have a few little 'girl' gifts she'd been waiting to pass on, and...well, there I was. 

We were hoping to get a dresser that I could fix up. We ended up getting the perfect dresser that was move-in ready. And some new friends.

It was a pretty sweet Craig's List experience, if you ask me.

When we got home I couldn't wait to see how the dresser went with our fabrics. Check it out!!

Could it BE any more fabulous?!?! Eeeeeeekkkk!!! I am so excited!!

I finished painting the bookshelf gray and we moved it back in last night, too. I couldn't wait to put our kid books on it and LOOK- suddenly our nursery looks like it might actually be a nursery some day!!

 And now I need to work. Happy Monday!!