Here goes nothing........

February 19, 2009

I have been encouraged to create a blog for our adoption journey. My fear has been that I will have nothing of any interest whatsoever to say or share. My hope, on the other hand, is that someone may be helped or guided through their own adoption journey through my many mistakes and successes.

Here's the story of the start of our journey...

The first time I talked to Ken about my desire to adopt was Mother's Day 2007. He had other plans. I gave up surprisingly quickly and I moved on (or so I thought).

Then a year later, almost to the day, I started to bring it up again this time I was not so easily pursuaded. I wanted to do it. We discussed it, laughed about it, cried about it and waffled for about a month. Once he saw that I was serious, he got serious. We decided to adopt a beautiful little girl from China on June 10, 2008. That was the day we emailed our application in to our adoption agency and the day we found out that our application had been accepted. I was ecstatic!

We received our instructions soon after for the dossier and I was determined to get our paperwork done at lightening speed. Now, all of the mothers and fathers that have been down this road are laughing out loud right now....lightening speed is rare when dealing with any of the paperwork and just because you move fast doesn't mean anyone else will!

I read about everything from the building of The Great Wall to The Lost Daughters of China, to attachment books to books on parenting in an interracial family. I read any book I thought would help. I was on a roll. What could go wrong?

Nothing went wrong for a while and then in late August we hit a road block. A big, cement road block!

Our agency began to have issue with Ken's repeated run ins with the law in his youth. We received a phone call that our application was offically being withdrawn until further notice. I FREAKED! I was devastated and I played the "what if game" until there was noone else to speak to. It was during this month of complete chaos that we had our last meeting with our social worker to wrap up our homestudy. She calmed me down and opened my heart to other possibilities. She assured me there were plenty of orphans out there in need of a families love. With this, I moved on. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I will be forever grateful to her.

In the second week of September we were told that we had the green light to continue on with our adoption. It was about five days later that we told the agency that we had decided to withdraw our application.

On September 12, 2008 Ken and I Fed Ex'd our application to begin our journey with Adoption Advocates International (AAI) to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia. We could not be more certain that we made the right choice!