Matching.

I have so  many flippin' blogs in the works, including one explaining the hat I'm wearing above (BEST CAUSE EVER), but none are finished and while posting incomplete blogs is not beneath me, their content is more deserving than a half-assed effort from me.

Aside from the rigors of regular life (read: alarm clocks, cooking, shaving my legs), life has been crazy busy with  preparing to adopt an infant. We are working with an agency to enter into an open adoption, which means we'll have some level of contact with our child's birthmother. We feel it's important for our child to have a connection with their birthparent and our hope is it helps with his/her identity. Not to mention, we'll always know who to thank for the greatest gift in our lives.

Right now, it's all about paperwork, finger printing and home study applications. Once we are cleared, we'll be "searchable" by birthparents on the adoption website and free to chat with any pregnant birthparent who contacts us. Not every conversation will lead to an adoption, but once we click with a birthparent, we are considered officially MATCHED and we await the arrival of the bambino. Once the baby is born, the birthparent does have a limited time period to change her mind, but the agency we're working with is has counselors who monitor the situation and help work through the feelings with the birthmother to make sure they are making the right choice for the child, whatever that may be.

For sure, it's scary, but because it's an open adoption, the percentage of women who change their mind is very low with our agency. Birthparents know they aren't losing their child forever with no way of knowing if they've made the right choice.

Hopefully we'll have exciting news to report sometime in the next year!

So, no baby yet, but we have all kinds of time to talk about what we'd be doing if we DID have one.

Like this morning.

Lazy Sundays in our house usually start with us chatting in bed, figuring out our day and playing keep away from the dogs. The keep away game is usually my responsibility. Today it resulted in the decapitation of the stuffed sheep. Sad.

"So, whatcha think we'd be doing today if we had a child?" I asked, snuggling with the headless sheep and burrowing down under the covers.

"Well, he or she would definitely be in bed with us right now, right here," Apes said, patting the space in between us. "Then, we'd get up, brush our teeth and probably go out for some kind of adventure. Maybe down by the river if it's a nice day."

Nodding, I wanted to know how the night would end.

"A game. You know we'd play lots of games with our kid. My mom used to play this game with me that I LOVED. She'd get a deck of cards, turn them all over and we'd take turns trying to find matches. Have you ever played it?"

"Uh, YEAH. Every kid on the planet plays the match game."

"You wanna practice right now?" April was out of the bed and walking toward a bag sitting on our dryer.

Before I could figure out why in the world there'd be cards in such a big bag and why she'd really be so excited to play with them, she turned over the bag and this fell out:

Well played, April.

Well played.

You know how much I like to match socks.