So much to say. So little time. So little energy with which to say it. Convention is less than two weeks away. A week from today Mike and I will be moving into the Convention hotel for 7 days. It is Ca-Runch time. Crunchy! It’s all going well, it’ll be awesome and we’re getting excited, but planning a convention for 450 people is A LOT of work and we’ll be ready to have our lives back! Thank goodness we’ve got lots of people working on this thang. It’s kind of like training for a marathon: we’ve spent months (two years actually) preparing and following a training schedule/agenda and a lot of the time we’ve said, “And just WHY are we doing this?....When will it be over?...But it WILL be worth it!” And then when the big day(s) finally arrive, we’ll be excited and nervous and thrilled and full of trepidation. And then when it’s all over there will be this let-down. This post-Big event sigh of relief/sadness that it’s actually come and actually gone. (That’s when I will commence with master bathroom-makeover, garden shed installing and generally nesting and preparing for life to change).

Speaking of life changing, here’s a quick adoption update: We meet with Mia this Wednesday to negotiate the “Communication Agreement” (the legal document that maps out the plan for our contact with her post-baby). As you can imagine this can be a little intense and awkward, but we have a good feeling about it and there’s a neutral agency representative there to help maneuver through it. We also found out three items of EXTREMELY good news: our adoption fee will be $2000 less than what we’d thought (Praise God). And then ironically the same day we found out about the lower fee, the car broke down and sucked up $1200 of that saved money. Funny how that works.

Second item of great news: Mia does not request any input on naming the baby!!! HOORAY! (And no, actually, I’m not broadcasting the name this time ‘round. Believe it or not I CAN keep a secret…sorta. Sometimes….we’ll see. I will just say it’s pretty much the awesomest name ever and it’s not Abigail, fyi.)

Lastly, we learned Mia’s birth plan: being the smart girl that she is, she is aware of the emotional rollercoaster that she is in for and she will not hold the baby or see us at the hospital. We will get a call when she goes into labor, once the baby is born she (the baby) will be taken immediately to a private room; we’ll either be in the waiting room or arrive shortly after. When I thought about this scenario it made me a little sad: Baby’s just going to be hanging out in a room by herself with no one holding her just post-birth?!….and then I realized that (if all goes well), we’ll actually be able to hold this baby a lot sooner and longer than we did with either of the boys. I mean obviously I saw both of them and got to hold them for a MINUTE but then they were whisked off the NICU and we didn’t get to hold them for at least a day. We’ll also get to feed this baby sooner too. And at least this time round I won’t be recovering from labor, 7 weeks of bed rest and the struggles of nursing a preemie (and thus also having to pump and bottle-feed). This is DEFINITELY a different kind of labor-delivery-baby-scenario and it’s stressful in many ways but filled with huge blessings in many other ways. What. A. Ride.