The first Eli post

When we first decided to adopt Eli, I knew I needed to write about it, but I also knew that we weren't ready to tell everyone yet. So I started a new blog, called "One Seat Left in the Minivan" and posted there exactly five times before I spilled the beans. I'm not the kind of person who can maintain two personal blogs, so I'm going to move over the posts from the other blog here, just so I can have them all in the same place.

This post was originally published on August 9. 

In the back of my mind, I think I always knew that adopting Rose wasn't going to be the end of our story. She's so much younger than the other kids, and let's face it, it's not too hard to pick out which "one of these things is not like the other." I didn't want her growing up feeling like the odd girl out. But last year when I was broaching the topic of adoption with Eddie was not the time to bring it up. Sure, I joked about it with my mom and my sister. We even came up with a name for our future boy, since he'd have to be a boy to even the score. We called him Hugo, because in the afterword to the last Harry Potter book, Ron and Hermione have a daughter named Rose and a son named Hugo. Pretty soon, Hugo was a frequent topic of conversation at our house. "When we get Hugo..." and "Hugo will sleep upstairs but the big boys will move to the basement." Ed's immediate answer was, There will be no Hugo."

But as we've had such an easy transition home with Rose, Hugo started to weigh on my mind. I figured that he was older than Rose, a toddler, living with a foster family somewhere in China. A few weeks ago, I contacted the case manager at our adoption agency, just to let her know that I might be interested in seeing some files sometime. I started scouring waiting child websites, looking at the toddler boys, figuring I'd recognize him when I saw him.

Then, last week, our case manager sent us a file. He was younger than Rose by six months, which surprised me. He had needs I hadn't really considered before (for some reason I always thought that Rose or Hugo would be a heart baby). But he was from Rose's SWI, and he had the most adorable gummy smile. I wanted him to be mine.

This morning, we filed our letter of intent to adopt Han Leman.