NSJ

And the pull up…

As if to say “crawling is sooo one day ago,” yesterday Niko pulled himself up into a “down dog,” and them pushed up to standing, and took one step forward. All without any help. Scary stuff.

In other news, we went swimming…

…hung out at Google…

…and chilled on the couch…

Think these two are sisters? I don’t see the resemblance at all.

Megan, Molly, and Grandpa Lew are out visiting us here in the View. Molly was probably the inspiration for Niko’s first crawl (her and the potted plant). She was crawling at five months and walking at eight, so she is a walking & crawling sage. Three additional mouths have made no appreciable dent in the apricot population.

More photos…

Nicholas crawled for the first time this afternoon. I am both extremely proud and utterly terrified. One of the first things he did was crawl over to the potted plant, eat half the dirt, and throw the other half on the floor.

Nobody told me these things become mobile.

It is June, and you know what that means? The apricot plague. Our extremely prolific apricot trees throw down some serious ‘cots. This seems great until you realize it all happens in a two week span. Most apricot recipes call for something like 2-3 apricots, which doesn’t help us much. So after we have flooded friends and neighbors, we are forced to make hundreds of gallons of apricot jam to deal with the sheer volume. Nicholas now plays that all important (and previously unfilled) role of “yelling and banging stuff together.” Sumo continues to play role of “eating anything that falls on the floor.”

We are headed to court on Tuesday to finalize Nicholas’ adoption. Which leads to the obvious question, “you mean you haven’t adopted Nicholas yet?” Nope. Well yes. Err…kind of. It is probably easiest to just explain the process.

Step 1: Birth Mother Letter

After deciding to adopt, the first step is putting together a birth mother letter. Think, “trying to convince somebody give you their child in two to four pages.” This was intimidating at first, but got easier once I realized I had a wife and a Mandy that were going to do most of it. At first I was put off by the idea of putting together a marketing brochure for your parental potential. But once I internalized the fact that these women were trying to decide where to place their child, it felt like the least I could do.

Sadly, it is called a birth mother letter and not a birth parent letter, because most often it is only the mother who is involved.

This is a PDF of our letter.

In addition to the birth mother letter you need to take an eight week adoption class, get an FBI background check, full medical work up, retain a lawyer, retain an adoption agency, get three letters of recommendation, collect your entire financial history into one binder, and work through a mound of paperwork.

Step 2: Waiting for a Match

Now you sit back and wait for somebody to be wowed by your amazing profile. We got lucky here. We connected with Mary and Jonathan even before we finished our letter. This is unusual, although we were probably due for a bit of good luck. We later learned that Mary initially dismissed us because page two of our letter has me slaughtering lobsters, but her friend Laurie got her to reconsider (thank you Laurie). My earrings also played a role in the initial filtering as did Brown.

In order to learn more about us, Mary and Jonathan sent us a list of questions. I was actually camping in the Colorado back country when we received the questions, so it fell on Jul, Mandy, and Amy to put together answers. We knew we were dealing with special people when we read the questions. They asked us how we felt about the Iraq war (Surge! Surge!), the military in general (spend more), what we would do if the child was homosexual (send him to camp to fix it), and whether we consider ourselves environmentally responsible (our Hummer is painted green). Our answers worked for Mary and Jonathan, so the next step was to meet in person.

Step 3: Getting to know each other

We first met Jonathan and Mary a year ago. There aren’t really any established social norms for how this meeting should go. Fortunately Mary and Jonathan had a facilitator who helped us through the process. After an intense afternoon of discussion, the four of us went out and got Thai food. The next day we both agreed to move forward with the adoption. This isn’t a legally binding agreement — just a social contract to move forward in good faith. We took a few more trips down to San Diego (hosted by the always generous Thompsons) and stayed in touch over email.

Step 4: Baby

As we all know, Nicholas was born on September 26th. After a couple days in the hospital we took him home. Leaving the hospital with Nicholas was extremely emotional, and one of the hardest things we have ever done. You feel like you are taking somebody’s baby…because you are taking somebody’s baby. Before we left, Mary signed an 8022 form which grants us the right to make medical decisions for Nicholas. At this point we are babysitters with some medical decision making power.

Step 5: Relinquishment

In this step, the birth parents relinquish their rights as parents and Nicholas becomes property of the State under our care. This happened about a week later. Now we are babysitting for the State instead of Mary and Jonathan.

Step 6: State Review

Before the State transfers custody, they need to make sure you are fit to be parents. A social work visits four times and talks about adoption, and parenting. Given we had a high touch lawyer, a facilitator, an adoption class, four adoption books, a social worker in San Diego, and a Social Worker here in the Bay Area, this was a bit redundant.

Step 7: Finalization

So that brings us to tomorrow. Exactly one year after we met Mary and Jonathan, the State will officially grant us legal custody of Nicholas Scott Johnston. At which point all I can say is…

Kid, you’re stuck with us.

There is a lot of hoping involved in raising a child. You hope your child stops crying and goes back to sleep. You hope he will eat more so you won’t be in trouble at the next checkup. You hope he is alive when you go to get him in the morning. You hope to get that big grin when you get home from work. You hope that flicker in his eye, is a flicker of recognition that you are his father. You hope he doesn’t hurt himself. You hope he doesn’t eat too much sand. Mostly you just hope that he is happy. Happy with himself. Happy with who he is and happy with who he becomes. All of this hope is bundled up into an aching love that I didn’t know until I was a father.

Adoption adds more hoping. You hope for amazing birth parents. You hope for a birth father that can relate to your son. Somebody who can explain the past. Somebody who can be where the boy came from. And for this, I don’t need to hope.

Happy Father’s day Jonathan, Dad, Lew, Luke, and all the fathers in our big extended family. Thank you for hoping, and thank you for being all I could hope for.

My friend Joe always reminds me you have to celebrate the little things, because they make all the difference. In that vain, we are celebrating the fact that Niko did his first pull up this week. Everybody knows this is important because it is one of the critical events in Ronald Regan’s Presidential Fitness Challenge. Despite having taken “the challenge” as a child, I have no idea what is involved in the shuttle run. But given he isn’t crawling (forward) yet I’m not worried about it. One event down, four more to go.