Nesting

In the last few months, we've been preparing for becoming new parents in lots of ways:

• praying together every night for our baby
• taking adoptiong training courses online
• reading lots of books Raising Adopted Children,
• Talking with Young Children About Adoption,
• Attaching in Adoption,
• Your Baby's First Year and more.
• spending more time with kids at our church (we've been volunteering in the nursery once a month)

In addition to all this, we've been gradually collecting all the "stuff" that is needed to take care of a little one. All of this comes together, to me, under the umbrella term "nesting." It's that loving, home-making, emotional and physical and spiritual process of preparing to nurture a tiny life who will soon be 100% in our care.

Nesting is an important concept in the adoption literature because it can be hard for some adoptive parents to nest, for fear that the baby they're hoping for might never come. We're fortunate in that respect because, the way the Czech system works, there isn't really any chance at this point that we won't be given a child. Since we're not linked up with a specific birth mother in advance, we don't have to worry about getting our hopes up. So nesting is free to be a joyful and anticipatory process through which we slowly but surely build towards this monumental event.

It helps to have a job to do while we're waiting!

One of the most fun things lately has been searching (over several weeks) for the perfect stroller. We've gone to at least 5 different baby stores around Prague on several occasions, searching and searching for the right one--and we finally found it! Our conditions:

• lightweight and easy to pick up (to get on and off of trams!)
• sturdy (these things aren't cheap, so it's important that it last)
• needed to have one of those little aprons for keeping the baby warm in cold winters, these are called "cosytoes" :-)
• needed to include a rain cover
• not a "baby hummer" (as our friend, Matt Smith, calls the giant, unwieldy prams that some moms lug around Prague)
• affordable

The one we ultimately settled on (there really wasn't any contest, actually) is by Chicco, the Ponee XS. We decided to go ahead and get it now largely because we really like it and you never know when things will go out of stock (in actuality, this is more my philosophy than Matt's, but he got on board after we talked it through), and we also don't know when the baby might show up (we don't want to have to scramble at the last minute and be rushed to pull everything together). So, we've been having fun for the last 24 hours trying out all its different configurations and pushing it around the flat.

Lamby, our stuffed lamb and stand-in baby for the time being, seems to approve.