Mile 13

In the beginning I made the mistake of looking at the adoption process as a whole. Each document to collect, every form to fill out and so on and so on. The list seems to never end and the number of hoops to jump through is yet to be determined. I made myself so overwhelmed and wasn't even sure where to begin. It all became this mess of a do-to list that I was more afraid of than I was motivated by.

I am a Marathon runner. Running is my therapy and my vise. My motivator and my mental organizer. Running, I can do.

So Dustin sat me down on one particularly overwhelming day and explained it me in one of the best ways he could. This is what he said....

"When you are gearing up for a Marathon you don't think about all 26.2 miles at once. You go into it knowing that you did your training, you put in the work to earn each mile and each mile is an accomplishment. If you went over your route and allowed yourself to feel the exhaustion you may experience in those miles, you might not start the race to begin with. You think about mile one... and then mile 5... then 8.... until finally, you hit mile 13. The half way point. From there you celebrate a little knowing that you have come this far and remind yourself that you can, and will, make it to that finish line. You just need to continue focusing on one step at a time and celebrating each mile passed knowing you are one step closer. You need to look at the adoption process the same way. Don't overwhelm yourself with mile 20 when you are only on mile 2."

From there, I actually took the time and broke down the adoption process and figured out each "mile" stone. Well, I am happy to announce that we are at Mile 13! Our halfway point! We have our Completed Homestudy in hand and have sent out our I-600a form (which is basically asking permission to take a citizen of another country and make her a citizen of the U.S. as our child.) We are now working on compiling our dossier. Once this step is complete, we will get a travel date from Vika's Country and we will finally meet our sweet girl.

I love running, but Mile 13 has never been more beautiful.