Parent Amnesia and the Case of the Saucy Photos

We are officially suffering from the effects of PA: Parent Amnesia.  Now that Peanut is nineteen months, we have decided to start the process all over again and try for a second child.   Apparently we have completely forgotten about the crying, round the clock feedings, and exhaustion that those first six months contain (I blame the chronic sleep deprivation…which apparently can also cause hair loss…who knew?).  When I mention to friends with kids that we are doing this again, they shake their heads and smirk knowingly, which should be warning enough.  If I hear one more parent tell me that having two kids isn’t double the work, but more like one-hundredth the work, I think I might have a nervous breakdown.  Literally.  But, I guess I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid because we’re doing it anyway.

In addition to a staggering mound of paperwork you need to prepare for adoption, we need to make a new adoption profile.  For the uninitiated, the profile is a short picture album with shots of you and your family experiencing the joys of domestic life: travel, hobbies, holiday celebrations – which is surprising, because those are the types of things that families usually screw up, causing lots of stress and years of therapy (I still have nightmares about that one Thanksgiving).  The profile is essentially a savvy piece of marketing that is aimed at getting prospective birthparents to pick you.  The production quality of these things really runs the gamut, and we have been blown away by some of the ones we found while scouring the internet (see, not just for porn).  We saw one profile that looked as if it had been ripped from the pages of People Magazine.  I mean, seriously…People Magazine?  How can we compete with that?

Design aside, I shudder with the painful memories of our first attempt at making an adoption profile (which can cause relationship stress, by the way, an auspicious omen for parents-to-be).  Never in a million years did I think I would be aggressively lobbying to move a page header three quarters of one inch towards the left margin.  Seriously…I need new hobbies.

But life has changed a lot since our first go round (i.e. a certain nineteen month old ankle biter) and we just don’t have the same amount of time to hunker down in front of a monitor and fight over which photo from our trip to visit the in-laws is the perfect one.  So I offered to take a crack at selecting pictures to get the ball rolling. 

Thus I found myself installed in front of the basement computer late last night clicking through file after file of old photographs, stored deep in the recesses of our shared network drive (which I guess lives on my hubby’s computer…unclear on that at the moment).  It was like a journey back in time!  I switched on iTunes with a particularly melancholy playlist (Journey + Chicago = tears of reminiscence) and was enjoying an evening of pleasant memories…until I discovered photos of my husband in various stages of undress.  More undressed than various.  It only took me a minute to realize he had saved all of his old pictures from every digital camera he ever had on the hard drive of his computer.  Beyond the deliciously saucy photos (mmm, saucy), I got glimpses of his life before he met me (and well before Peanut made three).  Photos of friends and guys he dated: his New York life.  I had a New York life, too, although fortunately or unfortunately it isn’t preserved on my hard drive (some of it I would NOT want to relive, OY).  It’s odd – we’ve been together almost seven years and I barely remember what my life was like before I met him.  Still, I enjoyed this opportunity to get a glimpse into a younger (and more “active”) hubby.

And the naked pictures were pretty amazing, too.