Our adoption finalization date is only a couple of days away!

I’ve been through this experience a few times before. Still, I am nervous and jittery. I think it’s a combination of excitement mixed with a little bit of fear that something could possibly go wrong to stop it. I’m sure that won’t go all the way away until everything is truly finalized.

So, we prepare.

We’ve called our family and friends. We’ve invited them to the courthouse for the adoption itself and/or to the lunch scheduled afterwards. It will be interesting to see how many choose to attend. While all have been supportive of our childbirth style additions, not one of them neglecting to come by the hospital, it’s been strange to me how many consider a courthouse adoption to be unimportant.

I am nervous that we haven’t been able to find a current phone number for the kid’s birth mom. She’d told us before that she wanted to be present at the adoption. I’m worried that the adoption will have happened before we can find anyone that knows where she is, can get a message to her, or can give us a number we can use to contact her.

We will be finalizing in the city we lived in when we started this adoption process a few years ago. It’s only a couple of hours away, but logistics of traveling even that far with a family of our size can require creativity. Our adult daughter and her husband will be driving down along with us as well.

An adoption day tradition for us is to go have a new family portrait taken immediately after the adoption. We’ve planned the outfits (I love to have matchy things!) and purchased most of what is needed. I still need to get out and get pants for Max and Simone, a whole outfit for Alexandra. We’re going to wear very simple outfits this time, as opposed to the fancy matching dresses I’ve purchased in years past. Still, especially for the children being adopted, I want them to have nice, new outfits, simple as they are.

We’re going over and over with the kids exactly where we’re going, what we’re doing, and what it means. Most of them act like I’m dumb. Duh, they’re going to be our children forever now – they all figured they were before. Maybe it won’t make a difference to them. But, I’ll be happy to finally have that piece of paper to say they’re really, legally mine.