int because it's a spare room. Because we have more bedrooms than bodies to fill them. Until now.Last weekend I could wait to ready our little one's bedroom no longer. We had planned to work on her room after Christmas. There's no rush. Our agency has said it might be six months before we can travel and bring home our little girl. And we use the pumpkin room. A lot. As a spare room, it has no specific purpose, so we use it for everything. It's the computer room, the t.v. room, the play room, and lately, as I try and catch up on the family photo albums, the scrapbooking room.
Clearing out the pumpkin room took most of a day. As my family huffed and puffed up and down the stairs, hauling away a closet full of games and old VHS tapes and dismantling the computer desk so it would fit through the door, I started to feel a little silly. We have no place for the computer. So for now 
we've crammed it in the corner of our bedroom. We stuffed the t.v., the videos, and the toys in our already crowded basement playroom.
My husband and my twelve-year-old son indulged my nesting frenzy with grins and good-natured eye rolling. But I questioned the wisdom of putting an unused crib where the computer used to go. Of robbing the room of its purpose.
Now I stare at the crib and the overstuffed rocking chair and the chest of drawers used by my other two babies and I realize that my nesting instincts weren't wrong. This room, more than ever before, is filled with purpose.
This new bedroom is proof that our little girl is coming. That she really and truly is coming. She is not just a little picture pasted on our fridge. She is more than a medical report, an orphanage intake form, a one page list of her skills.
Now, she is filling up spac
e in our house. She really exists. And very soon she will be ours.
When you're pregnant, you feel your child inside you. She's a tangible presence. Filling up space. Your womb is her room.
When you adopt, you feel your baby inside you, too. Every day. But until Saturday, we had made no room for her. Now that we've built her "womb," my nesting frenzy has passed. I feel calm. At peace.
Her bedroom is still pretty bare. The drawers are empty. Very few toys and books line the shelves. Everett, our four-year, didn't like the empty crib so he spread a sheet from the linen closet over the bare mattress and laid his stuffed puppy, Rocky, in the bed. My husband cradled his arms and rocked an invisible baby in the rocking chair. Crowded in the small room, surrounded by white furniture, it was as if we'd all placed our hands over an invisible belly and felt our daughter's first kick.
In a few months our little girl will be sleeping in the crib. We will rock her in the chair and try to hug away the traumas of her life. In her referral picture she looks so terribly sad. The picture was taken right after she was relinquished by the mother who could no longer nurse her. Her brown eyes are wide with fright. Her head is newly shaven against lice.
We imagine her in the future playing in her room, unrecognizable from that picture. She will giggle when her big brother tickles her with Rocky. Her big brown eyes will fill with mischief as she pulls every single book off her shelves. She will have a head full of curls pulled back with a bow.
We emptied the pumpkin room this weekend. We didn't change the paint. We always liked the color. But it's no longer the pumpkin room. It is our daughter's room. It's little e's bedroom.
