Take a good idea and make it your own.

We’ve officially hit the “expect the phone call any day now” mark and I can sense we’re in the calm before the storm. There’s also this sense that something really great could happen-or something really, really devastating. It’s hard to consider one without considering the other, so Kerri and I are just left with a feeling of numbness which is a sucky way to prepare for your baby.

We had our call with the birth mother in our adoption last week and it was nothing short of wonderful. Granted, it was a fairly akward conversation, but I think we all did about as well as can be expected.

The biggest news to come out of the call was that our new baby girl will be named Elizabeth and that we’ll be calling her Ellie for short (though I suspect some “Ella”s and “Lizzy”s will probably slip in there.

According to RescueTime I was pretty busy, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that I was NOT climbing El Capitan in record time. Yikes.

We are getting more and more involved in the referral process on our adoption and the reality of what we are doing–what we are becoming a part of–is revealing itself to be a very complicated and, at times, scary thing. That said, reviewing some of the paperwork we’ve received as part of our referral I came across this single sentence. Written by the birth-mother as part of the process of giving up her child for adoption, I think it captures what this is all about more simply and elegantly than anything I have seen yet.

I’m hesitant to jump the gun on it, but it appears that we may, in fact, have our adoption referral. If all goes according to plan we’ll be traveling to Orlando, Florida sometime in August or September. We don’t know much else about the baby at this point except that he/she is bi-racial and appears to be healthy.

There’s so much wrapped up in this process for me that the process of beginning to “unpack” it all, as my dear old fried and professor Jim Wheymer used to say, is nearly overwhelming. I think we are up to the challenge as a family and facing this all with our eyes open.

We did a small amount of work for evri a few months ago and it’s been hard to keep a lid on how awesome the product is. Some really great thinking going into it. Search Less, Understand More: evri Demo | D6 Highlights | AllThingsD

BO:”Checkmate.” HC:”No, I’m still in.” BO:”Check the board; I won.” HC:”No, I still have two roundhead guys and a horse.” BO:”OK. Whatever.”

Twitter / Merlin Mann: BO:”Checkmate.” HC:”No, I’m…

better recognize…