Ready... Set... ... ...

I haven't heard anything about maybe baby or gotten any Hallelujah calls in 2 weeks- but in my head it's more like TWO WEEKS! I have a bad case of baby fever and it's taking a lot of strength not to stalk the matchers.

My life with Baby 4 is hectic and full, so I know I sound crazy asking for more BUT right now is our normal and it's not going to change anytime soon. Since I already have to go to the Foster Care Clinic all the time with 4,  wake up every 2 hrs overnight to do breath checks, and we have breaks scheduled into our routine every 4hrs for nebulizer treatments- why not add a baby with a similar schedule into the mix? In just three weeks, Baby 4 will be starting preschool which gives me a solid 3 hrs of undivided baby attention everyday. I can't think of a better time to be getting that Hallelujah.

Since there is not a lot I can do to get Baby 5 here any faster except proof read (again) the email I'm sending to the matcher Monday morning, we have been focusing our energy on getting our house as baby ready as possible.

Baby 4 has gotten BIG since coming home in March. He's gone from 28lbs and not even on the chart for percentages to 37lbs- 25% for both height and weight. Am I a terrible Mom for not knowing his height offhand? Probably. Either way, he's too big for his race car toddler bed. I started talking about how awesome big boy beds are and how he would be closer to being a grown up if he slept in one. The day came last week to make the switch. We took everything out of his room so Brandon could steam clean the carpet. I told Baby 4 that he could bring all the big boy stuff back in after the carpet dried. He went back and forth between wanting his race car bed to come back, but in the end he was happy to give it up so he would have room for a papasan chair that we found in the attic (from when Brandon had a man cave now 4's room).

Big Boy Bed, Papasan Chair, and over the door Basket Ball Hoop

4 and his train very excited for their first night as big boys!

The crib was a source of stress for me. We have 2 full cribs, an apartment sized crib, and a bassinet. My thought was to have a crib in each kid room and the apartment sized crib in our room. There was no rationale in it, I think I just like having cribs around. Brandon, being partly a logical person and partly oppositional to my ideas, wanted to take down the cribs in 4's room and our room and set just one crib up in our extra room. His reason was that our county has a two under two rule that would limit us to 2 babies in the house at one time- so we would never need 3 cribs. We're not asking for a sibling set, and even if we got one the likelihood is that the older child would go into a toddler bed. Further, we wouldn't have 4 share a bedroom because of the behaviors he has displayed and the noise of his nighttime machine would make it impossible to hear anything in his room with a baby monitor.

Our One Lonely Crib

Brandon said that we should train any baby that is too big for a bassinet to sleep in their own room anyway since we're not very good at getting them out of our room (Baby 1 &3 were still in our room at 8mo and 1yr when they left). Even if the county called us with triplets tomorrow, how hard would it be to trek up the 8 stairs to the attic and get down the other cribs? Moral of the story is that Brandon was right and we now have one crib set up in Baby 5's room and the bassinet in our room.

Then we moved on to our spare room- soon to be 5's room. It was kind of a tease to have bunk beds set up when we have no intentions of taking a child older than Baby 4, so we took those down. We originally set it up for respite 3 and his 6yr old brother when we thought they would be coming together and often. We ended up only having 3 and he only came twice before going home with his biofamily. We set up the crib and kept the toddler bed in there so we are ready for the call!!

Before- set up for kiddos

After- Ready for Baby (except for the lamp on the floor, I'm working on it)

Don't let the colors fool you, I'm ready with some brown paint and blue race car bed should baby 5 be a boy. Although, we could use some dresses and bby dolls around here.

We're ready and set, now we wait for the county to give us the "GO!"