family-building

taking the next step …

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The adoption information night gave us hope that we will move forward on our journey to parenthood and that we will become a Mommy & a Daddy.

Why you ask?  Because we could see it happening from what we are learning.  We have talked and decided the best path for us is through domestic open adoption.  Not only did we attend the info night then we went on to sign up and attend an 8-week education support group about adoption.  Again through Resolve.  Through this group we met other families who had adopted and were living in open adoptions with their children and their families.  We met adult adoptees who longed to know their birth families and how important it was/is for them to connect and we met birth parents who had made the choices to place their child for adoption.

It was through these meetings and subsequently working with a well-known facilitator in open adoptions, that we knew this was how we would become a family.

Along the way we were recommended books that we found very helpful to us in our process.  First and foremost we were told we needed to look at ourselves and see where we were with our own grief and loss for not having a genetically tied child.  One of the books recommended to us and that we both read was “Adopting after Infertility” written by Patricia Irwin Johnston.  It helped us find a place to allow our grief to happen but to move forward without forgetting where we came from.

Other books recommended to us and we thoughtfully read were

  • “Dear Birthmother” written by Kathleen Silber
  • “The Open Adoption Experience” written by Sharon Kaplan Roszia
  • “Lifegivers” written by James Gritter
  • “Hospitious Adoption” written by James Gritter
  • “The Children of Open Adoption” written by Kathleen Silber
  • “Attaching in adoption” written by Deborah Gray
  • “The Third Choice” written by Leslie Foge
  • we subscribed to Adoptive Families magazine right away too!

These books unfortunately are not readily available in your local bookstore.  Through Amazon Books and Tapestry Books  we were able to find them and more!

These are books that helped us to develop our sense of what being a family through adoption and having an open adoption might be.

Reading and finding a community of support helped us to feel we were making the right decisions along the way…and so we began moving forward on our journey to parenthood through adoption.

where to begin …

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So now that the decision has been made, well at least talked about out loud but how do we begin?  Where does one go when they are considering adoption? the internet and the library of course!

So taking a leap of faith we begin really considering our decision to journey to parenthood through adoption … what does that look like?  Will we consider adopting through a domestic adoption? international adoption or foster adoption?  Do we know anyone who has adopted? hmmm…

Books that’s how we start with books!  I look back now and think of one of the first books we bought “Adoption for Dummies” I hear some of you wincing and chuckling but I tell you it was a great place to start.  In reading this book it became clear to us that maybe just maybe a domestic adoption would be our way to have a family, we wanted to have the experience of parenting from infancy.  But were we sure? not yet exactly.

What next?  Well the internet of course!  Google adoption ~ WOW!  Well that gave me too much to look through.  How do I narrow this down?  Okay google pre-adoption support, that’s better a little more contained.  Here we are a local number and organization that offers pre-adoption support ~ Resolve.  Yes we saw information for this organization at some of the fertility clinics.  They offer information on adoption too?  First up an information night, two hours of our time to hear what adoption is and what it might mean for us.  Okay we are signed up.

We have our book to read as we wait for the approaching date for the information night we are to attend where we will hear in more detail what having a family through adoption looks like.  Will it be a domestic adoption? international adoption? or foster adoption?

Second choice, not second best

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People ask why did we adopt?  Well it wasn’t our first choice to have a family through adoption, it came after the trials and tribulations of trying to conceive.  It’s not like adoption wasn’t something we hadn’t mentioned at least once.  You see our journey to parenthood was not exactly as we had planned.

Our path changed course after years of trying to get pregnant, first on our own and then with the assistance of medical science and local area fertility clinics.  After spending more money than I want to think about and feeling more like a pin cushion, for me it became about becomming a Mommy and not needing to become pregnant to do that.

So our second choice ~ adoption ~ became the path that we would journey to parenthood. We do not see this as second best, it is the best choice we made to find ourselves as Mommy & Daddy.

We suffered through infertility and not belonging among other friends and family having children around us.  When we walked onto this different path we found ourselves amongst others just like us, here because we wanted to become parents and realizing it’s not the second choice but the choice to make to become parents through other means.

I will use this blog as a means to share our journey, how we educated ourselves and sought out the support and community we needed and continue to be part of through our journey to parenthood through adoption.  I will also share what parenting children that are adopted is like what makes it different and what does not from our personal experiences.

We are today, the proud parents of two daughters entrusted to us each at birth.  We have expanded our family not just with our daughters but with their families as well.  We have become one big family seamlessly and we realize how blessed we are!

I hope you will join me as we share our ups and downs to family building whether you are already a parent through adoption, someone considering adoption as a way to family, a birth parent or an adoptee or someone just curious what is a REAL family.

Welcome …