How Can There Be Less Than 8 Weeks Left?

At the end of last week, I was convinced that there were 9 weeks of school left.

But I was wrong.

It was 8, and now it's 7 and two days.

How is this possible? I am FREAKING OUT.

First, I'm freaking out because I'm worried I won't be able to squeeze in all the stuff I have left to do in my self-contained English class. We recently started Out of the Dust but I also need to do The Giver, which is my FAVORITE unit every year, and I spent so much time on writing skills at the beginning of the year that I am pressed for time on my novels. Novels where the first involves a character with RPL and a infant loss, and the last has me explaining the concept of birth mothers and how you can be pregnant when they don't identify birth fathers. I save all the interesting stuff for last, I guess. And I am trying REALLY HARD to not end the school year with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which I'm reading with my self-contained reading class to synthesize all the strategies and deeper reading skills we've learned all year. I love the book, and it's so wonderful for making inferences, but my god is it depressing. I need to make sure that we can do something happy for a few days after. I am somewhat of a terrible person for ending the year this way again. "Happy summer, sorry I stole all your innocence! 9th grade literature and history aren't quite so depressing, enjoy the sunshine!"

But that's just part of what has me in a tizzy.

I was so sure that we'd get our call sometime in the spring, and I'd go out on maternity leave at some point THIS SCHOOL YEAR. I had a school baby shower at the end of September to help us get ready for Mystery Baby. And here we are, almost May, only 7 weeks and change left, and Mystery Baby is still every bit the same ephemeral, amorphous concept as he/she was in September.

Now, the interesting thing is that my Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources let me know that the ideal timing was late June or July for leave. That that would buy me insurance coverage for the summer, and FMLA clock starting in September, and my 5 adoption leave days + 3 saved up personal days paid leave would start in September, giving me a bonus check before the rest of my leave. I would get 5 months for the price of 3. (While New York did just pass Paid Family Leave, it doesn't start until January 2018. So I'm hoping I go out before I'm eligible to take it, obviously, but YAY NEW YORK.)

But...what if summer comes and goes and we still don't get a call? I have to say that I will actually feel embarrassed going back to school and STILL not having a match, not having any real update that will result in parenthood, still waiting.

I know it's entirely possible. This process is unpredictable, and all-or-nothing, feast-or-famine, zero-to-sixty. But it would be hard, going back to school and still having to give my spiel about having my phone on at all times and "we're expecting through adoption, it's like being in your third trimester all the time but you can drink and have coffee, har har HAR."

So it's amazing to me that there's so little time left in this school year, and while we've had three profile calls nothing has changed, not really. We don't feel totally left out in the dark, because our book has gotten action. But we haven't hit the jackpot yet, to put it in not entirely sensitive terms.

There's still time -- we haven't gotten a call in April yet, and we had one January, February, and March. I know this is not a pattern or a causal relationship. We don't HAVE to get a call in April. But it sure would be nice. It would be nice to have my fortieth birthday come with a promise in the ether. I still have May and June.

It's just so hard, the not knowing. And the feeling like I've disappointed all the people who were so generous in September, helping us to prepare our nursery and be ready for that call to come at any time. Maybe I need to send out an email newsletter of sorts at the end of the year, with pictures of our nursery, and let them know that we have had action, just nothing that stuck, and that all those wonderful onesies and boppies and spacesaving high chairs and oodles of board books will most definitely get used.

We just don't know when.