More steps

I actually let myself go in to a Babies R Us for the first time ever tonight.  Through all the pregnancies and losses, I've never let myself get my hopes up enough to go in there.  I've never actually bought any baby things and still haven't, but just going in there with my mom all excited to look around was a huge step for me.  Shannon thinks we can't think about buying a crib or anything since we don't even know what age or gender child(ren) we'll get.  I can see his point, but we also have to plan ahead.  If they call us in a few months and say they have kids for us, we have to have a room ready and a place for them to sleep.  This is one of the first questions I've have for our case manager when we meet with her soon-- what do prospective foster/adopt parents do?  How do we plan for this?  My dad and stepmom have bought cribs for all the other grandchildren in the family and have graciously offered the same for us, beds for the kids no matter the ages.  So to me, it make sense to go ahead and get one of those cribs that converts to a toddler bed or day bed or full size bed.  Then we can be prepared either way.  Just got to get Shannon on board with this crib-buying business.

When we moved in to our house three years ago, we had grand plans to repaint several rooms, etc, but haven't ever gotten around to it.  One of the rooms we plan to use for a child is painted this awful mustard yellow and has an ugly wallpaper border around the top of the room.  I finally started the project of redecorating this room in preparation for a child yesterday.  I began tackling the wallpaper border, which proved to be a much more difficult and much messier job than I'd anticipated.  But it felt good to do.  Again, this was never something I let myself do each time I was pregnant.  There was too much uncertainty then.  But we know without a doubt we will have kids in our home before too long now and it's time to start getting ready for them.  And after everything we've been through in the past few years, that feels so unbelievably good to be able to say.