This is all starting to feel very real to me, and to us. After so long hoping to have a baby, we are actually going to have one! It’s really happening. To mark the shift from dreaming about having a baby to actually having a baby in the next 9 months or so, I wanted to buy something. You know, so it officially felt real. With the timing of our adoption, it’s as if we just got a positive pregnancy test. So Jamie and I went to the baby store the other day.

This was a big deal for us. We’ve never had any reason to go to a baby store before. I’ve typically always bought gifts for baby showers online. When everyone around you has a baby or is having a baby and you’re having a tough time getting pregnant, the baby store is the last place you want to be, with all those cute little baby shoes and clothes and stuffed animals. So I was really excited that it was finally my turn to shop at the baby store. I thought I would float through this beautiful little store where I would instantly recognize all of the fluffy little items my baby would need.

In my giddiness at having a reason to walk through those doors, I was totally unprepared for what we would find when did walk through those doors… a million pink and blue things I did not recognize and a million more I did not realize we needed.

“What IS all this crap?” Jamie asked me.

“I have no idea,” I replied. And I didn’t. It was immediately overwhelming.

Instead of floating through and finding the perfect made-just-for-our-baby things, we looked at each other and quickly realized that we were not yet ready for this trip. We’d spent so much time dreaming of having a baby that we were totally unprepared for the reality of it. So our first purchase on our baby shopping trip was a book about what to buy for the baby. Boring? Yes. Yet somehow it perfectly marked the transition. We have no idea what to expect, what’s in store for us, how long the adoption will take or what we need to buy for the baby, but we do know something: our baby is really coming. It’s not just a dream anymore. It’s real. Things are in motion. Buying that little book somehow proves it to me.