Who knew?

Was talking with a good friend on the phone last night (hi honey!) and realized midway through the conversation that adoption has now become a part of her life too, in a weird way because of us. It's kind of hard to explain what I mean, but I'll give it a shot. When TubaDad and I decided to adopt, we thought we were the main people impacted by that decision. It sounds naive now, looking back with the hindsight of, uh, (checking my countdown clock) 496 days in this process. But we truly thought it would be just the same to our friends and family as if we had announced we were pregnant. Ha ha ha, so wrong... What happened instead was that as TubaDad and I learned about mindboggling things like adoption, China, the INS, DTCs and LIDs, referral processes and timelines, and acceptable adoption language, our friends and family learned about them too. It's like when we picked this path, we unknowingly enrolled everyone around us in Adoption 101. And I never would have guessed that going in. Some of them asked really thoughtful questions, some read this blog or other blogs, some agonized over the referral cutoffs with us each month, some joined Yahoo adoption groups, some read books about adoption, some made sure we got plenty of "kid time" with their cuties so we'd get used to different ages and stages, some called just to see if we needed any help or to share a fun joke or story. It's not over yet, but to all of our friends and family -- thank you for going through this with us. We appreciate every single thing you've done to learn about adoption and our process or to keep us sane during the wait. I can't wait to get to the end of this whole experience (see how optimistic I am this week actually talking about "the end"?!) and call to tell you about our child.