Pittsburgh is cool

I am up at 4 am as I am traveling to Pittsburgh for work today. Not sure why I got up so early as my car pickup is not til 5 am, but whatever.

Lots moving forward here - we have finished gathering photos and feedback on our profile and will be sending it to the profile gods tomorrow night. It takes about 14 business days to get it formatted and made, and then we will up and ready to be selected!!! Our last home study is a week from Saturday - she takes about a week to write it up and then that will be done. All of our paperwork is ready to go except Jez's shots, which will be done a week from Saturday. After that, we are live!

Saw a new doctor to get my adoption physical. She was nuts. She is an Eastern/Western doc whichI thought I would love as I thought hell, maybe she can fix me up with a homeopathic remedy as well as modern treatment, but instead she spent most of my appointment asking me about my infertilty, telling me I was "weird" and "unusual" for having the genetic mutation AND PCOS, then telling me to pray to God for help with my infertility. Huh? She also had pamphlets in all kinds of languages all over her office about how god can cure you. Double huh? I of course being me informed her I was an atheist and she then redoubled her efforts to get me to be in touch with God and pray to refind him. I was tempted to search for "atheist" on dictionary.com on my blackberry to show her that in fact being one meant you don't actually BELIEVE in god, but instead finally said "can you please finish the exam as I have to get back to work?". I was there an hour but 45 minutes was religious haranging. Jesus. Literally.

We also had a 2 hour call with A, our Adoption Counselor. She went over our Planning Questionaire in great detail, telling us how our answers measured up in terms of what they usually find. The fact that we are willing to do transracial, specifically Latino, bears out well for us as that is vast majority of the birthmothers they see. J is thrilled as he loves Latino culture and would love the chance to parent a Latino baby. I was just thrilled as I thought she was going tell us we were 3948609380965 years out from getting a baby as we were too stringent. In fact just the opposite happened, she really was positive and supportive and told us we looked great.

I want to find out how I can check on wait times - AA says it is 3-9 months in our particular type of adoption - but I wonder if that is BS and really it is 3 years but they don't want to scare us off.

There was a question in our weekly newsletter about stay at home moms versus working moms and attractiveness to birthmothers. The adoption counselor gave the "well lots of different birthmothers want lots of different things" answer but I wonder if the fact that I work will hurt us.

In fact we sent our profile to a few friends who gave GREAT feedback on small areas we could clarify and tweak and a few mentioned that our jobs sounded very "busy" and that we may want to focus less on our seniority and more on the fact that both of us have a lot of flexibility in our work. We talked at length about this, totally agree with the feedback, and are doing just that, but it feels shitty that we have to play DOWN our careers rather than celebrating the fact that we both have been lucky and successful. Society sucks. But, they are 100% right - we don't plan on having our child care raise our baby and want to show that we are able to be flexible and be home more often. Sigh. I never thought the only glass ceiling I would hit would be in my ability to be seen as a good mom.

Lately there has been some epidemic of people in my life getting pregnant. I have felt sad, happy, jealous, mad and thrilled for these folks but wonder if at any time I will ever truly get over the pain and if it will stop hurting. I hope so.

Must take shower and go fly to beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. Remember when Sienna Miller called it Shitsburgh? Huh. Will keep that in mind.