Thank you all for your thoughts and comments. Well, I blew the "speak slowly" part with my dad, his girlfriend, and my sister. I don't even remember how I initially stated the first sentence, but Brian caught me and said "that's not what you meant to say." I paused and thought about it and then re-stated "we came up this short weekend for a reason. We have something to tell you." You could say total shock, surprise, excitement for that portion of my family. Brian's mom and dad asked if we were adopting a dog or a cat. We both laughed and repeated ourselves a couple of times and said a "child." Then, one of his sisters walked in the room and said "I thought you didn't want another dog." This time Brian's mom joined in with us in stating that we were "planning on adopting a child." It was actually pretty funny.
Yesterday when we were at church, we told our preacher's wife and she was so excited. She assumed we were adopting a child. Then, some very close family friends came up and he overheard Texas and stated that we would enjoy the weather there. Brian immediately stopped him and said we are not moving. Brian went on to say that "we were planning on adopting a child." Well, he assumed a dog. It took up three or four times stating that we are planning on adopting a child before he believed us.
Overall, we did not received the response we had expected. Yes, our parents were completely shocked and did not expect it. Brian asked his mom if she had written us off for having children and she admited she had. But, later Saturday night when we were at Koh's, she said we have to go to the baby section. She also was trying to convince me that green and yellow would look nice together in the nursery
We did not hear anything about the things we thought they would bring up as concerns: $, age, retirement, open adoption. . .my dad did ask if we would get the medical history and Brian's mom asked us which bedroom would be the nursery. My sister said she wished we had told her sooner so she could have been saving money
We thought everyone would have a lot more questions, but we think we might have answered a lot of them because we talked about so much of the process and what we have learned from orientation and the Forum. Brian and I are both still satisfied that we waited until this point, because we feel like we were prepared to handle the situation even though it ended up going much better than we could have imagined. I do remember that many of you told me I would probably be surprised and I was
Cathy