What To Expect When You're Expecting a Two-Year-Old

If you've been pregnant anytime in the past 25 years, chances are you've read it. What to Expect When You're Expecting is the book that answers every question you could possibly have about pregnancy and many you couldn't even have dreamed up on your own. It breaks down each month of pregnancy and let's you know what symptoms to expect and also what developmentally is happening with the baby. I remember pouring over that book with my first baby, eagerly reading each month as my pregnancy progressed, delighting in discovering when his fingernails and eyebrows developed! Of course by my 3rd pregnancy I could never even remember how far along I was, people would always ask and I'd just quote my due date!

Recently they've even come out with the book What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding: A Reassuring Month-by-Month Guide for the Father-to-Be, Whether He Wants Advice or Not, I'm really not sure how my husband survived my pregnancies without such a reassuring month-by-month guide!

But, search as I might, I have not yet found the reassuring month-by-month guide answering all my questions and letting me know exactly what to expect now as I'm expecting a two and a half year old!

A friend and I were discussing the adoption this past weekend and she asked me, "So, what's it like? I mean it's not like you are pregnant, but you are expecting, just with a two year old!"

And it got me thinking about the pregnancy book and wishing I had some sort of guide for this journey to our 4th child because somedays the unknowns, the unexpecteds, the unanswered questions can just about drive you nuts!

Maybe if such a book existed it might have warned me that despite having a to-do list a mile long, my husband and I would spend hours researching the region and city our new daughter is from, digging through the internet for maps, photos, news articles, even YouTube videos showing people from that region, anything to glean just a bit more information about our daughter and her life before us.

Of course the book couldn't outline what is happening with our daughter developmentally, because unlike fetuses, 2 year olds can vary drastically from one another. So, we rely on the referral write-up, cling to each picture we've gotten, and relish any details provided by other adoptive parents who have met our daughter while visiting their own child. And the couple videos we've been blessed to get? Well, let's just say we've watched them several times, with our faces pressed right up to the computer screen because that's as close as we can get to our girl. But, I have to say those videos of our 4th child, of her smiley 2 year old self, are way cuter than the sonograms that gave us glimpses of our other 3 children before we could hold them in our arms and stare at them face to face!

And though there is no guidebook for this journey, no due date or end in sight, and that makes things scary sometimes, we are grateful to have the best guide ever. He just happens to be the greatest expert on adoption, has adopted billions of children! "He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will," Eph. 1:5

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