We are planning out our mini-vacation for the year right now. Or rather, I am. I tend to be an over planner (or at least that’s what my husband says). I tend to agree with him.

I don’t like things to be unsettled. It was overwhelming to me not knowing exactly what days we would be going and where. Normally, it’s not that difficult for us, but this time we are meeting my parents. Last year, we went with my husband’s parents. It’s not that I don’t want to go with parents (hi mom), it’s that it added that extra layer of planning. There was a sigh of relief through my household when I finally scheduled the hotel rooms.

One of the things I’ve noticed about prospective parents is that everyone wants to know the timeline. Over and over on the adoption boards, I see people asking the following questions:

How long did it take you to go through the process?
How long did you wait before you received your referral?
Does anyone know how long it takes to get your fingerprint results?
When did you receive your travel call?

Because I had spent so much of my childhood steeped in the adoption world, I didn’t try to put a timeline into place. I put everything in order so that I knew that if A happened than I needed to start working on B, but I tried really hard not to attach actual time to my list. It’s hard not to. You want to plan. You need to plan. However, one of the things I’ve noticed is that in the case of adoption, too much planning can make things worse. Everyone’s situation is a little bit different so you can use other people’s experience as a guideline, but never as gospel. If nothing else, we are working with two governments who have their own timetables (that make no sense to the common person). There is a lot less stress if you don’t set artificial deadlines that you can’t guarantee will be met.

It’s hard. For someone like me, it’s nearly impossible. In my case, I couldn’t get around setting some deadlines so I set worse case scenarios instead and I mean worse case scenarios. I might have wanted something to happen in three weeks, but I set a deadline for nine weeks. If it came before that nine weeks was up than I was pleasantly surprised and everyone was happy. It kept me from calling my social worker and agency every day to ask them if they heard anything and it made me look far more patient than I really was.