At last...photos!

No, not photos of my little princess. I'm still waiting on those. It's only been a month, actually, but a month feels like a century when she's growing so fast and I don't want to miss a single stage. I realize how blessed I am to get photos and a 5 or 6 paragraph update once a month...that's more than I could have dreamed of. Maybe one day I'll write an entry on how much I adore my daughter's a-parents, we'll see. Anyways, the photos I'm talking about are the ones of her birth father. It only took him a few months, but that's water under the bridge because they're in my hands now and that's all I wanted. He still has a few more to get to me, he just needs a little more time to "dig them out," according to him. He gave me one when he was probably 3 or 4 months old, one when he's about 7, one when he was 11, and a more recent one in which he is 28 or 29. I have a few of him that were taken within the last two or three years, so all that's missing is some from his toddler stage. The majority of the photos of myself that I wanted to include in the scrapbook are from when I was younger...starting around the time of my baptism and going up until I'm five or so. Those are the years, in my opinion, where you really change the most...not so much when you're 11, so I sort of wish he had given me more from his baby years. I've learned to take what I can get from him, though. I met up with him after work, and we actually ended up talking for over an hour. It was one of the first decent conversations we've had in the past few months (since we actually rarely speak), and it was going well until the end. Somehow it came up that we shouldn't even be talking (I think I was the one to segue way into it) and I said that I felt stupid for just having spent so much time with him because I know better. I know it's wrong, and I'm still putting myself in that position. He told me the last thing he wants to do is make me feel stupid, and the last thing he wants to do is hurt my feelings any more than he already has in the past. He told me how strong I am, which I don't necessarily agree with. It took some super-human strength to leave the hospital on November 4th without my daughter, yes, but I don't know where it came from. It wasn't me - if I had to relive it, and do that one part over again, I'm not sure that I could. Anyways, I ended up crying, over something I can't remember right now. We were talking about the photos and I remember him saying "our daughter" and I lost it. That's one of the reasons I can't be around him - every time I'm around him, I feel as though she should be there, too. It's me and him and someplace else in the world, there's a little version of me and him combined...doesn't it seem only natural for her to be there? I left right then and there, because I didn't want to stand there crying like an idiot while he hugged me and thus made me cry even more. I got home, had dinner, and called it an early night and went to bed around 9:30. Then my phone rang at 2 a.m. and it was him, wanting to make sure I was okay because he felt 'messed up' for making me so upset. According to my phone log, we only spoke for 6 minutes, but somehow I managed to tell him that it wasn't he who made me cry, it was more the fact that I miss my daughter. I also explained to him how I feel her presence lacking even more when I'm with him than I do when I'm alone, and that's hard for me...and lastly, I told him that the whole reason for us meeting (to get the pictures) was sad in and of itself, for me, because it's not natural that the only way my own child will recognize me is because of a picture. Or should I say, the only way she will recognize us is through a few pictures. Apparently that made him upset, too, because his voice started cracking and he told me he didn't feel like talking anymore and would have to talk to me later. Oops. I was just being honest.

Another oops: this post turned out to be mainly about her father, and not about her. But I guess he is part of the whole adoption story, anyways, so it's okay. I don't have much to update about my little girl at the moment, sad to say. They are traveling right now and as we speak (or as I type), she is seeing more of the country in her nine months of life than I have in my 23 years. Good for her, though. That's what I wanted for her, among all the other things she has....swimming, music class, "pre-preschool" next year (which, again, I didn't even know existed)...those are all luxuries I most likely would not have been able to offer her.

So, I leave you with this:

He couldn't deny her even if he tried ;)