Blatantly obvious revelations, and other musings

I have had "aha" moments with all of my children. What I mean by this is that, for each of my children, there was a moment of "WHOA, I have a BABY." With Ella, this moment was a few days after her birth. Sheref had to return to clerkships (we were both 3rd year med students at the time) just a few days after Ella was born, so I went out to stay with my parents, who lived just outside of the town we were in. I was sitting on the yellow and blue couch in their sunroom, looking at this absolutely breathtakingly beautiful baby girl, swaddled in a pink receiving blanket, lying in our brand new Moses basket. I remember saying out loud, "I can't believe I just had a baby."

For the twins, I think there were several moments in which Sheref and I thought, "Whoa, we just had TWINS..." As in TWO babies, as in two THREE pound babies. Whoa.

For Charlie, that moment was tonight. I looked at him, happy, giggly, joyfully splashing in the bathtub, and thought, "Whoa, we have a baby." A baby boy born half-way around the world, whose photo we found on our adoption agency's online photolisting of kids who for one reason or another could not be matched with any family. Not in South Korea. Not in the U.S. Not in the whole world. We saw his picture in the evening on Tuesday, June 22nd. By Friday, June 25th, he was ours. Really quite amazing. More amazing, in a way, than pregnancy and birth.

I read a lot of adoptive families' blogs. Many are excellent, some super cheesy, some just annoying (I generally don't read the annoying ones more than once...and cheesy is cool -- see my last post). So many people claim that their adoptive child was "meant" to be theirs, and very often their logic that God chose the exact right baby for them seems a little weak to me. Things like "his birthday is exactly 2 months from my husband's" (oooooh, forgive me for not seeing the destiny in that) or "her name means 'grace' in [whatever language], and Grace has always been my favorite name." I mean, I'm pretty sure 50% of names mean "grace" or something that could be translated as "grace," and isn't Grace 2/3 of Americans' favorite girls' name?? Nonetheless, I don't doubt the underlying sentiment.

Because, although I'm not naive (or cruel) enough to think that Charlie's birth mother was meant to have to relinquish her baby for adoption, he just seems like he was meant to be our son.

And that was my "aha" moment tonight.