Where to start...

So, without boring you to tears, I thought I would try to give a brief synopsis of our family.

My oldest, Tyler, was born during my last year of college. He was a little premature...meaning that when you're on the pill it says it should take about 3 months after you stop taking it before you become pregnant...I was pregnant within 2 weeks! He was induced on New Years Day, which was his due date. Now, I love him, and it is nice to always have his birthday off, but I'm just saying....would he really have been any less healthy if they would have induced me the day before? Since when I had him I was in my last year of college and was waiting tables, but by the following year I had a "real" job, I'm thinking I might have gotten a slightly higher tax refund if he'd been born December 31st. (I am using the term "real job" quite loosely given that I was working as a manager for Taco Bell. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just not what I though would be my first job out of college.)

Cameron came next, a little over 2 years later. I had been on the depo shot between when I had Tyler & Cameron. Again, they say it will take 3-6 months before you become pregnant after stopping...it took 1 month. Cameron was also induced, but this time they made me wait 2 weeks after my due date. Obviously those doctors have no idea what cruel and unusual punishment it is to make somebody go into work for 2 whole weeks after they are due! For Tyler I had also had an epidural and seriously felt NOTHING...it was great! The hospital I had Cameron at didn't do epidurals, they did something else that begins with an E and doesn't work worth a crap! So since I basically had one child with lots of drugs and one with almost none, my advise is TAKE THE DRUGS! I do not love Cameron any more than Tyler just because I felt every minute of his delivery.

We had always talked about having 3 kids, about 2-3 years apart. So after we moved to Southern MN when Cameron was 2, we began trying for number 3. And we kept trying for several years. It may have been wise for me to have seen a doctor about it, but given how easy it had been to get pregnant with the first 2, we assumed our timing was just off. Plus, since we already had 2 healthy children, I had a hard time justifying any fertility treatments.

During this whole time, we had gotten our foster care license and had children placed with us from the get-go. We actually even had the opportunity to adopt our first placement, but it just wasn't the right fit for them or us. They ended up being adopted by a great couple about an hour away from us. We had several other placements after that, but some ended up going to relatives and another was again not the right fit. One placement included a 16 year old girl (who is the poster child for why we don't take teenagers anymore), and on that same day, a 9 month old infant from our town was placed in another foster home. So I gave our social worker a bad time about giving us the teenager instead of the baby. She said that they usually try to place babies in homes that would adopt them if it came to that. We made it clear that we would love to adopt a baby, I had thought they already knew that from our licensing interview. Two months later they called and asked if we would be able to take a 5 month old baby girl.

To be continued...