Saving Surprises - It's Not our Forte

The following is my journal entry from June 8, 2018:

I have loved having talks with my girls about our plans to adopt. Last year I brought up the idea and they thought it was a great idea! This week we have talked about it every day. They love to ask questions and imagine what it will be like. I hope I can give them a realistic idea of how things might go so they will be prepared. It won’t all be rainbows and unicorns like they probably think it will be. But still, it’s cute to hear the questions they have and the plans they are making. They are so on board and that just makes my heart sing!

“Will we get to have a brother or a sister? Or BOTH!?”

“How old will she be?”

“She can have my bedroom! I’ll sleep in Penny’s room.”

“Can she sit by me at the kitchen table?”

“When does she get to come here?”

Every day, one or both of them will bring it up, and every day I remind them both that although we don’t keep secrets in our family, this is a surprise. We can’t wait to tell our friends and family about this, but we want to wait a little bit longer before we tell them. We want to wait until Mommy and Daddy get to sign a few papers first. So for now, we only talk about it at home with Mommy and Daddy and we don’t get to spoil the surprise by blurting it to anyone else.

So naturally, when my mom was at our house today, it took less than ten minutes for Ariani to blurt out, “Hey Grams! We are gonna let a kid that doesn’t have a family come live with us!” I was shushing her before she made it to the end of the sentence, but it was too late. Of course, I was happy to be able to talk to my mom about it, but that wasn’t really how I envisioned telling her. I had planned to tell her and my dad together at the same time, while David was with me, and be prepared to answer their questions and share with them the story of our calling. But instead, it was, “Um, yeah, we are planning to adopt through DHS. We haven’t gotten to sign any papers yet and we don’t have a caseworker and basically, I’m not sure yet how long it will take. Um, yeah.”

I guess it’s time to push the romantic ideas out of my head anyway. I mean, this isn’t a Hallmark movie. It’s our real life and it’s not as fancy or beautiful as what we always imagine it will be. But somehow, it’s better.

I don’t think we can wait much longer to share our news, with Ariani walking around trying to keep the “surprise.” So I think we’ll tell David’s family in a couple of days, and honestly, I can’t wait.