Let me tell you about my weekend.
So. Late last year and early this year, some of you may have read of my adventures with the World’s Worst Fertility Clinic. Long story short: my wife has McCune-Albright syndrome, which means our chance of getting pregnant without help was less than 1%. We tried in vitro fertilization, which seemed to take but then failed. The World’s Worst Fertility Clinic then refused to refund money for procedured we’d prepaid for that were never performed. When I wrote them a polite but firm lawyer-letter, they finally coughed up the cash.
Since then, we’ve been considering our options. We settled on adopting from China, because it just felt better to us than doing a domestic adoption, and we didn’t like the idea of bioparents lingering around nearby. So, we started jumping through all the adopt-from-China hoops, of which there are many. If you’ve never done it, here’s what we’ve done so far: [ul]
[li]We had to get recent (no more than 2 years old) certified copies of our birth and marriage certificates, have a home study done, get employment letters, get fingerprinted, get letters from the county sheriff saying we’re not wanted for any crimes, have medical exams done, and submit an application to adopt a foreign orphan to Homeland Security and get fingerprinted and FBI-checked by them as well.[/li][li]After we get each of those documents, we have to get them notarized. Then, we send each document to the Secretary of State for the state that issued the document or licensed the notary (three different states all together) so that they could be “certified”, which means stapling another sheet of paper to it with a pretty seal on it.[/li][li]THEN, we send each document to the Chinese consulate for the region (again, three different regions) so that they could be “authenticated”, which means stapling a sheet of paper with Chinese writing on it to each document and putting a pretty red Chinese stamp on it.[/li][/ul]After completing all those steps, you send everything to your domestic adoption agency, which translates everything into Chinese, binds it up into a dossier, and sends it to the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs. When they look you over, decide all is well, and put you in their computer, you’re “logged in”, and the year-long (or so) wait starts until you’re matched with a baby. Then, you fly over, pick up your new child, do more paperwork, and come home as a slightly larger family.
That all sounds pretty neat, right? So, here’s what I was getting to:
On Saturday, the very last authenticated document arrived from the Chinese consulate. So, we finally had everything we needed. Time to send it all to our adoption agency, and start the long wait for the match.
But wait, there’s more!
Also, on Saturday, my wife, to ease her mind because she was late, bought a home pregnancy test. And took it.
And it was positive.
There were two tests in the box, so she took the other one.
Also positive.
Now, false positives on home pregnancy tests are a lot more rare than false negatives. Still, this couldn’t be right, could it? We told a few people, but we held ourselves back. We’d been burned once before, with the IVF, and we didn’t want to get too excited until we had some solid confirmation.
In the meantime, we bought a home test of a different brand on Sunday, just in case the first one was flaky or something.
Positive.
Okay, this is starting to look like something’s really going on. On Monday, she goes to the doctor for a blood draw to test her HCG level. Below 5 means “not pregnant.” The highest it ever got when we were doing the IVF was about 80, and then it crashed.
When she got the results, she drove to my office to tell me. HCG level = 4,034. There is most definitely something going on.
Anyway, that’s my story. On the very day the last document we need in order to adopt arrives, my wife tests positive for pregnancy against overwhelming odds.
Okay, come to think of it, that’s not the whole story. Obviously, when something like this happens, your mind goes, “Now what?” Now what indeed. My wife said one of her first thoughts was, “What if it’s a boy?” because we’d been so mentally prepared for getting a girl from China that we weren’t ready for the possibility that we’d have a boy first. That one’s still a big question mark.
But, we want to go ahead with the adoption as well. We’ve gotten so attached to the idea (one of our friends called our as-yet-unborn and -unadopted Chinese child “Ping Ping”, and we’ve used that as shorthand to talk about her ever since), and we’ve come so far, that we want to see it through. We’ll just have siblings, probably so close in age they’ll be practically twins.
It’s madness. That’s what it is.
But I can’t stop laughing.
