Each new year is a fresh start, and I think I know what all of my readers are hoping the new year will bring – a new addition to the family! That was definitely my wish as each new year rolled around. I would hope and pray that I would ring in the next new year with my child fast asleep in our nursery.

Do you make New Year's resolutions? I sometimes do but do not take them very seriously. I can tell you some resolutions that I never made while I was waiting to adopt:

• Find a way to stop aching when spending time with friends' children


• Focus on appreciating what I do have instead of what I don't have


• Let go and let God


• Limit my phone inquiries about that status of our adoption to once a month


• Relax


• Spend one day a week not thinking about adoption


• Stop buying things for the child


• Stop calculating how long I have been waiting


• Stop obsessing over when the child will come


• Stop wishing on every star and birthday cake that my child will come soon


• Talk about adoption less

Nope, those were not my New Year's resolutions because there is no way I would have successfully done any of them. Instead, these would have been better bets for me:

• Be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease from the adoption agency


• Fantasize about spending time with my child


• Pray that my child and his expecting mother will be healthy


• Pray that my child will join my family soon


• Prepare my finances so I can be a stay-at-home mom when my child joins my family


• Think about how much I love my child-to-be, even though we have never met

I would not have had to work hard to meet those because I was doing those things already.

I hope that this New Year brings a new child into your home and that 2008 will go down in the history books as the year that your family became complete. I also hope that you will look back on this time and realize that everything worked out the way that it was supposed to.

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Photo Credit: Lynda Bernhardt