New Arrival!!!!

I posted on Facebook, but not everybody I know is on Facebook, so I'll post here as well.

Alexander Mikail was born Sunday night at 9:30pm. He weighed 8lbs, 11oz and is 21 1/4 inches long. He's perfect! He's beautiful! And he isn't really going to be ours for a while. We were able to bring him home from the hospital yesterday, so we have custody (technically LDSFS has the legal custody) for now, but the issues with the birthfather are quite far from being resolved at this point. He's (unfortunately unofficially) refusing to accept the paperwork that has been repeatedly sent to his house now for almost two months. It's amazing how a guy can "not be home" that often, and given the nature of the paperwork, he has to be the one to sign for it so that we can go to court and validify that he really did get it. As of today, we probably have at least another month before we'll know if we'll be able to keep Zander, or if we'll have to get on a plane and fly him back to Colorado. We've been praying hard, and we keep getting the very distinct answer that everything is going to turn out exactly as it should, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be the ones to keep him. How am I holding together at all? I'm worried, but not frantic, which some part of me is still insisting that I should be.

Zander and Kaalam have the same birthmother and they look EXACTLY the same. Zander has darker hair, and a darker skin tone, but if it weren't for that, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell their baby pictures apart. Zander even has the same "superhero" cleft chin that Kaalam has. They get that from their birthmom. I'll post some pictures, hopefully this afternoon. My computer is still refusing to acknowledge my camera. It's driving me nuts.

still no baby

No baby yet and our poor birthmom and I are both going crazy! This little guy sure is dragging his feet. The birthfather still has his paperwork and still hasn't gone to court, so I guess that every day we don't hear from him is a good thing. But he still has time left, so we're all still holding our breath. By the sounds of it he would really prefer the intimidate the heck out of our birthmom approach rather than going to court, but she isn't backing down and right now he's trying to track her down in Wyoming. I'm pretty sure that if he misses his deadlines the courts aren't going to take too kindly to the "I was trying to find the mother so I could threaten her a little more, so I just didn't have time to get into court and do things properly" excuse.

more complications

In Colorado, the birthfather is supposed to get his paperwork 20 days before the due date of a baby so that he has the time he needs to go to court to establish his parental rights or not. It's 20 calendar days, so you can pretty much discount weekends. Our baby is due on Sunday which was supposed to have effectively made tomorrow the last day the birthfather had to go to court and interrupt our adoption. A week ago I couldn't have told you the exact number of days to the due date, but I could tell you the number of days until the birthfather's time was up.

Apparently the adoption agency sent the letter to the birthfather by regular mail, not registered. Why would you do that, when you know that there are deadlines involved and when you know the birthfather is likely to use any excuse to buy himself more time? We specifically asked that they send it registered mail, because of what we dealt with the last time. Last time, the birthfather simply refused to go get his mail from his post office box and bought himself almost 2 extra weeks. This time the agency had the wrong address, but they didn't know that until yesterday when the letter they sent got returned to them. So now they have to send it again. Which means that his 20 days are starting just 3 days before the due date. Which means that we're going to go to Colorado and probably take custody of the baby and not know for nearly 3 weeks whether or not we're going to be able to take him home with us. We can't leave the state until the custody issues are resolved. How hard would it have been to send it registered mail to begin with so that we would have known weeks ago that they had the wrong address?

I'm quite astonishingly not as panicked as I feel like I ought to be. But I am really annoyed at the agency. If we take this baby home for three weeks and then have to turn around and give him back, how am I supposed to explain that to my 2 year old?

grrr. . .

Ok, now the name Alexander has made it onto our list. We'd call the baby Zander for short. Why can't I just pick a name already!?

arrgh!

We went to the Pirate Festival in Vallejo this weekend and even though I haven't figured out how to get the pictures off my camera yet, Ashley was great enough to share hers, so here's a few of my favorites.

The HIGHLIGHT of the day for Kaalam was getting to hold the parrot. He actually held the parrot on his shoulder the first time and Brandon says it was adorable, but I wasn't around and neither was the camera, so when Brandon found me we had to find the parrot man again and he was nice enough to let Kaalam get two turns. My parrot was never this well behaved. I would have worried he'd take Kaalam's nose off, but these birds were incredible. Definitely worth the trip in.

The biggest attraction at any of these festivals is of course, the window shopping. We didn't get anything this time around, but I know what I want for next year. :)
This is Carl and an axe. He and Brandon (and maybe Ashley - Kaalam and I were at the waterfront at the time) competed in the axe throw. I never did find out who won.

You'll notice that Brandon is in costume but I was not. Sadly, I do not have a pirate costume. A situation that will have to be remedied.

nap time

I cannot tell you how much I love nap time. Especially when it goes long. :)

names

Well, we are less than two weeks away from the due date, the birthfather has his paperwork in hand, the birthmom is is great spirits, the car is packed and ready to drive out at a moments notice and we think we've finally settled on a name. Maybe. It's been hard this time, partly because there aren't a lot of really great boy names that aren't super trendy. When we were looking for names it felt like our two options were traditional (Michael, David Tom etc. . .) or Aden(or Jaeden or Hayden) . We ran across any variation of Aden you could think of and every one of them is in the top 50 names for boys. Not that I don't ike the name. I love it! I've loved for years. But so does everybody else right now. :) And I have a nephew with the same name.

That being said, Aden is going to be the middle name. The birthmom picked it out, and I really do love it, I just don't want the poor boy spending his life sorting out who's calling who at the family reunions.

We're thinking Jarek for the first name. It's Polish (which is his heritage) and it means "strong or fierce). I have a problem when picking out names and that is that I feel like the meanings are important too and there were a lot of names that I liked that just didn't mean anything. I liked Quinn, but that just means 5. The one name that I absolutely loved was Marek, but it meant "war-like" and I just can't make myself name my little boy "war-like". What an awful meaning to attach to a little boy.

So, unless we happen across any name that jumps out and slaps us to attention in the next few weeks, the name we've chosen is "Jarek Aden". We think. Brandon likes Gabriel but does that strike anybody else as just a bit girly? I think I've known too many Gabrielle's. Maybe I'll post a poll and let people vote. :)

weird little boy

This morning Brandon and I went to get our blood drawn so we could finish up our physicals and finally get the hospital to send our records off to LDSSS. We didn't actually need our blood drawn to fulfill the requirements of LDSSS, but we couldn't convince anyone in the business office at Kaiser of that and they've been refusing to release our records without it, so we did it anyway. It was just easier. We never had these problems with Kaiser in Colorado.

So, we took Kaalam in to see how it was done. It's been over a year since he last got his blood drawn and we thought he might find it interesting. Brandon held him while I got mine done and then I held him while Brandon got his done and when Brandon got up Kaalam started struggling in my arms pointing to the chair asking, "Sit? Sit?". We set him down in the chair, thinking to give him chance to just sit for a second before we left, but he pulled up his sleeve and stuck his arm out telling us, "My turn. My turn.". When we told him he couldn't get his blood drawn today, he started screaming and struggling to stay in the chair insisting that it was his turn. He cried halfway back to the car. He knew it was poky. He pointed it out when they stuck the needles in. At least he didn't freak out, but now I'm a little worried he might try to find my sewing pins and practice at home. Maybe getting him up to date on all his vaccinations won't be as traumatic as I've been imagining. Of course, wanting to get poked in the arm isn't really the same thing as actually being poked in the arm.