Adoption

All my thoughts on adoption in general that I've taken the time to type out, all in one place.

When we first started out adoption journey we were going to be adopting from Ethiopia, but then things changed.  We thought we had a plan, and we got paperwork sent in the mail, and moved forward.  Then we switched to doing a domestic adoption.

Then, during the waiting, I had my first real experience with how some others view transracial families.      And that pushed me to actually starting to talk about race around here.  The wait was long, so I just kept sharing thoughts.

Finally, we were ready to be active with our agencies and stuff got real.  I didn't always share the roller coaster, but occasionally did.  I shared about the realities of some of our wait , and the heartache of the wait.  I distracted myself by ranting about articles on the internets and explaining more about the process we were using.  I updated about 4 months into our wait, not even realizing that we were so close to being matched with our son's birthmom.

At that point, of waiting for Abraham to be born, that it really became real to me.  I started allowing myself to think of this baby boy who was soon to be born as our son.  This new waiting game of the days passing slowly until he was born were a new kind of hard.  But, they would soon be over.  Really soon.

And then he arrived!!!  And he was amazing.  And I got to nurse him, which was something I'd worked really hard to make happen.

Getting his adoption finalized led us to some roadblocks that we didn't predict, and that required some reorienting of our thinking.  But in the end, all was working out and we were able to finalize.

I shared what our open adoption looks like, and our first reunion with Abraham's birthmom.

Other ramblings about adoption can be found here and here.

And now we are pursuing a second adoption!

We completed our home study, and much to our surprise, were matched in just 2.5 weeks.  Unfortunately, that adoption fell through.

3 months later we were matched again!  But the trials we would face attempting to adopt again were not be done and that baby was not to be ours.  We were in a very broken place.  And yet, we were in for yet another adoption not happening.

In the end, our sweet Malachi would come into our lives, and our family was finally complete.

Additional adoption posts:

My Sons Were Never Orphans
Thoughts on "Failed Adoptions"