Where to begin....

So, those of you who know me well are probably still scratching your heads. TJ's going to be a mom. Who would have ever thought you'd see TJ and mom in the same sentence?? I can assure you I was as surprised as anyone when I started to see my life differently.

When Tony and I got married I made it crystal clear I had no desire to have children. Quite frankly, I beat the subject to death. I just wanted to make sure Tony knew what he was getting into. Little did Tony know that Miss "I love kids but I dont want one" would later become Miss "I love kids and why can't we bring Lily home right now". At first Tony was shocked when I brought up the subject of becoming parents...and then he was thrilled!

You know the saying - opposites attract. That certainly applies to me and Tony. When we started talking about adoption 1,000 things went through my head and not one of them was related to finances. Tony on the other hand began crunching numbers. My brain would be going on all these strange tangents and Tony would be in the office trying to figure out how we could fund Lily's college education and our retirement at the same time. Believe me, I'm not trying to say that my thought patterns are at all normal. To be honest, after some of the things I told our Social Worker during our Home Study I'm surprised we were cleared to become parents. If you could've been a fly on the wall during one of Tony and my dinner conversations this is what you would've heard...

"Oh, I don't want Lily to be one of those kids who looks like she has older parents. You know....remember the kids you went to school with and you could just tell their parents were old enough to be their grandparents. Promise you'll stop me if I try to send Lily to middle school in a tartan plaid dress and Mary Janes. Ok?"

"My God TJ, you think too much. Your brain needs an off switch. I was wondering...do you think Lily will want to go to a college in Maryland or out of state? Because if we fund a pre-paid college trust...."

You get the picture.

Anyway, we took the plunge and submitted our paperwork (aka dossier) to China in September 2005. Since then we've been not so patiently waiting to bring Lily home. So why start a blog now? Honestly, I'm not sure. Since we're almost a year into what we thought would be a 6 month wait I guess there are worse things I could've started!