That's Incredible!

There are no crazy stunts or video game competitions, but you do get two posts in a single week. You can thank me later -- with whatever denomination of dollar bill you see fit.

Our second waiting families meeting of the week was held in the new co-op building in which Bethany will house the office of Julie, our home study writer. The setup there will be pretty sweet when it is completely ready; they have a little café area, several meeting rooms, a big conference room, a library (complete with a copy of Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, although I could not locate Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict on the shelves), and at least two (2) jars of Smucker's® jelly. We had a bit of trouble finding the place because that area of Johnson City features several roads which vanish for a while and then resurface on the opposite side of your current street. In our hometown, this is known as 'pulling a Clemmonsville Road.'

The meeting's topic was the hospital experience. Our guest speaker tonight is a social worker with the Holston Valley Medical Group, who has worked with Julie for a while. While much useful information was dispensed, something near the beginning of the discussion somewhat sent me into a place academics like myself call 'la-la land.' Part of the paperwork birthmothers fill out at the hospital authorize adoptive parents to do things such as feed the baby without the presence of hospital staff; without this, someone would have to be in the room in case we were to do something like, oh, drop the baby. At this stage, I must explain that I have an intense, irrational fear of baby-dropping. Seriously -- I have nightmares where I drop my child and am instantly ostracized by the entire planet as a baby-dropper, complete with fingers pointed in my direction. In the worst scenarios, a social services worker is actually parachuted to my location to get the infant away from my obviously perilous mitts. This problem of mine has arisen at previous meetings, and everyone is quick to assure me that I will not drop my child and that children are pretty resilient. After my ears took in the words 'drop' and 'baby' tonight, the gears were set in motion, resulting in a burning desire to ask what would happen if we were to drop our baby in the hospital. While folks once again tried to calm my doubts, I did notice that my question was never really answered.

Between shudders at the thought of the cry 'baby-dropper,' I was able to determine that hospitals (at least the one where our speaker works) do their best to accommodate adoptive parents during the birth. However, the hospital is not under Bethany's control, so we must be prepared for unexpected complications and general wackiness. For instance, the birthmother's confidentiality can easily be compromised if we get slapped with wristbands containing her full name. There is also a risk that the birthmother could change her mind about the adoption plan while in the hospital, with us in the next room. While we have no need to dwell on these possibilities when there is a perfectly good chance of my dropping the baby, we have to be prepared.

In closing, I need to issue an errata to my last post. The Knoxville Bethany office made sixteen domestic adoption placements last year, rather than the seventeen I claimed. I would have simply edited the post itself, but I thought it good for posterity to see that I am fallible. So little evidence presents itself, after all.

Stop laughing!