Reality Sinks In…

After we recovered from the shock of “C” saying yes to having us adopt baby girl, and after I thanked God about a million times I began researching everything I could about adoption; specifically, how the independent / interstate (i.e. an adoption occurring across more than one state) adoption process works. At this point, I had absolutely no idea what to do or how to do it, and boy, was I in for a shock! The amount of paperwork, costs, and time involved was enough to make anyone head for the hills!

So many questions and not many answers at this point… How do we get the baby back to MN?  How long do we have to be in NV before we can bring her home? And mostly importantly, how the hell were we supposed to pay for it all?  Here I thought the legal expenses were going to be fairly low considering we already had a birthmother and didn’t need the assistance of an adoption agency.  WRONG!  I quickly learned that an out-of-state adoption can easily cost between $15,000 - $20,000 or more! While I have a great job, my husband is a self-employed carpenter and in this economy, there’s not much work available in his field. In fact, the majority of work he’s had this year was in Minot, ND – a good 8 hour drive away – and he would be gone for weeks, or even a month at a time… definitely not an option when the baby arrives; I needed him home with us! 

I felt sick to my stomach; there was no way on earth we could come up with that kind of dough in such a short amount of time. We were about ready to throw in the towel and move on, but that little voice inside my head was not ready to give up… God must have brought “C” into our lives for a reason and I wasn’t giving up without a fight!

It was time to find a lawyer.

On Cloud Nine...

"WOW!" is the first word that comes to mind as I'm writing this post…

October 22nd started out like any other Saturday, we were finishing up moving and stopped by my mom's house to store a few things in her garage. As soon as we arrived, I could tell something was up - my mom was in an extremely good mood and said she had an interesting proposition for us. She proceeded to tell us the story of a nice girl living in Nevada (my cousin's girlfriend) who is pregnant and planning to give the baby (a girl) up for adoption (side note: my cousin is not the birthfather) and would we be interested in adopting her?

Would we be interested?!?!  Heck ya, we were interested; are you kidding me, this would be a dream come true for us!! There was a catch; however, the baby was due on December 10^th, less than two months away!  That didn’t matter to us though; we were ready to become parents, that much we knew.

After a couple of days of messaging the birthmother, who I will refer to as “C” from now on, it was decided that she wanted us to adopt he baby!  We were over the moon with excitement and happiness, scared, nervous, anxious all at the same time.  We were going to be parents in less than two months!  So much to do, where do we start?!?

Here's the story...

... Of a lovely lady (Nicki), who was bringing up a very lovely cat... she was just as crazy as her mother, that little kitty cat.

Here's the story of a man named JJ, who was busy living with three dudes of his own, they were four men living all together, yet JJ still felt all alone.

Till the one day when the lady met this fellow, and they knew it was much more than a hunch... that these three must somehow form a family... and that's how we became the Zinken bunch!

We've now been married over 5-years (together for 12) and are parents to 3 wonderful kitty cats.  Our dream is to have a family of our own; however, we never anticipated just how difficult a task that could be...