Adoption Dreams

You know those dreams pregnant women have? The ones where they dream things like giving birth to a litter of puppies, or they go to sleep pregnant and wake up with a teenage sleeping in the crib, or the kid is born and instead of crying he can talk? Well, I think those dreams effect adoptive parents as well.

Since this process has begun I’ve had 2 different dreams but both focused on ending up with more kids than we had planned. In the first dream I was at work and Kevin called me to say they had matched us with a child and that they would be dropping the child off at school later that afternoon (how the kid got from Ethiopia to St. Paul in less than a day I have no idea). Well, when the social worker walked in she had 6 kids with her, ranging from an infant up to a 6th grader. In this dream I was a little worried about where all the kids were going to sleep and how I was going to get them home since our car only holds 6 and 6 kids + me made 7. I woke up before we left the school.

The second dream I had (this was last night) went like this: We had received and accepted a referral for a baby. It was an infant about 5 months old. We flew to Ethiopia with Lexi to pick up our child. When we got there we were staying in the guest house of the care center (so far none of this seemed strange because this is how it’s actually supposed to happen). They introduced us to our child (a little girl) and we took care of her for the day. At night she went back to the care center to sleep. The next day they brought her back to us to care for again. The day we were leaving they had an entrustment ceremony for all the new families. When it was our turn they told us they had a suprise (this is the part where it got crazy). They told us that instead of bonding with one little girl we had been bonding with a set of identical triplets and then asked if we wanted to take all 3 girls home. Now, most people (including myself) would be a little panicky of the idea of taking home 3 kids when only expecting to be taking one. We’ll we took all 3 and the only thing I kept worrying about was the fact that once we landed in America we wouldn’t have 3 carseats or enough diapers. In my dream it was impossible to go to Target and get those things I guess.

My guess is this is all coming from the fact that we said we would consider twins or sibling groups and so I truly don’t know if we will be adopting 1 or 2 children. There was no place on the form to indicate if you would take triplets and when I asked our social worker if saying yes to twins also put us in the category of yes for triplets she told us that she had never heard of triplets being adopted from Ethiopia. But, guess what, I was looking at pictures of recently adopted kids and guess what I saw? That’s right, a set of 7 mo. old triplets from Ethiopia. I know I could handle twins or a sibling group but taking on 3 kids at once, it’s a little overwhelming. The parenting part isn’t but seriously, how do you take care of 3 new kids + Lexi on an 18 or more hour plane ride?