College Week

This past Monday Roger and I traveled up to Fulton, Missouri (Westminster College), to speak to a freshman seminar class about our adoption. Well, okay, Roger was speaking -- I was sitting to the side listening to him speak and helping out with details or dates he may have forgotten. As we all know, I am no public speaker. Definitely #1 on my list of least favorite things to do. I did, however, maybe kind of take over the question-and-answer session afterwards, so in the end it was a team effort. And let me tell you, what a great experience it was for us. We are definitely used to talking about our adoption with other adoptive families, close friends and family, but this was by far a new forum for us in which we were able to talk about our passion. With friends and family it is easy to be uncensored when we talk about the adoption process -- to speak of our frustrations, selfish wants and opinions, our impatience and worst fears. But when speaking in an educational setting to people who don't know us, don't know much about international adoption, well, it changes the way in how you word things. You for sure want them to know how it's not easy, how it's emotionally challenging, but yet you also want them to see the big picture of international adoption and how great it really is. The students had lots of insightful questions for us and for the most part seemed truly intrigued and interested to hear what we had to say. At the beginning of the class Roger did a recap for them of our infertility journey, all the testing and procedures we had done leading up to our decision to adopt, and, boy, I'm not sure they were expecting to hear such intimate details about us. About 30 seconds into the presentation when Roger said "So in April '06 Abby went off birth control," you could hear people shifting in chairs and clearing their throats. Too funny. At least Roger knows how to get their attention! But, as I said, it was an awesome experience for us and almost therapeutic in a way. We are at a "high stress point" in our adoption process right now, and for us to be able to share our international adoption experience to a room full of young, open minds was really so refreshing and good for us. We are excited to get the feedback from the class next week!

And then to end "College Week" I am heading up to Des Moines this weekend to see my cousin Megan who is following in my footsteps and attending AIB College of Business. I'm looking forward to being in the old dorm building again, reminiscing, probably driving Megan crazy with all my "I remember when" stories. I CANNOT even believe it's already been 10 years since I started college. Wow. So, yeah, it will be good to be out of town this weekend and have a distraction for two days before our next court date on Monday. We are, so, so, so hoping things go well on Monday. There are five or six other families with our agency who also have court the same day, so I'm hoping that works in our favor. Does that make sense? Probably not. At this point any logical reasoning we used to have has gone out the window. We have become really good at speculating about all sorts of circumstances that could, would, should work in our favor. Anything to get us through the day at this point.