Adoption

We’re adopting!  I’m sure most of you won’t be surprised to hear that we’ve taken steps towards a domestic adoption.  We have so much love in our hearts, and we can’t wait to have our arms filled again with another son or daughter.  There’s no replacing Clive and Winnie, but we are so ready to have children in our home.   Our hearts will continue to grieve, but grief and love and hope and new life can all co-exist.  Isn’t that beautiful?

We may still have more biological children in the future, but we definitely feel that adopting a child is what we’re supposed to do next.  Since we’ve always been interested in adopting or fostering, it hasn’t felt like a difficult decision to come to, it’s just felt right.  We didn’t know when we’d adopt, and thought it would be after we had a couple kids in our home already, but we feel that it definitely the right time now.
One hard part was deciding between domestic, international, and foster-to-adopt.  Since all of them have different paperwork right from the start, we were forced to make the decision early and feel certain that we should do a domestic adoption at this time.  While international adoption may be in our future, we didn’t feel a clear sense about adoption from a specific region or country right now, and there are several countries that have had significant delays and hiccups in the adoption process in the past few years (including some stopping all US adoptions).  Foster care has been on our hearts, too, but since the primary goal of fostering is reunification with families, we feel that it’s not the best situation for us right now after loss.

We have almost finished our homestudy.  It involved several day-long training sessions with our agency, lots of reading, tests, appointments, and hundreds of essay questions.

(The white pages are our essay questions…)

It was cumbersome, and even frustrating at times to think about what we have to do to ‘prove’ ourselves worthy of a child.  But, in the end, it’s easy to understand that the agency has to very thoroughly screen all adoptive couples to make sure that they are not allowing an unstable family to adopt a child.  They need to understand our upbringing, where we are in our grief, our philosophy on parenting, our expectations of adoption, and our stability in marriage, jobs, and friendships.

It can take many months (or years) to have a match or placement, we aren’t sure how long we’ll have to wait to bring our baby home.  We’re excited. We’re hopeful.  We’re nervous.  Nothing about adoption is simple. The paperwork, the decisions, the emotional rollercoaster, the cost, the matching, and the parenting an adopted child.  We’re so glad to have experienced several friends that are helping guide us through these decisions and give recommendations.  It truly takes a village!
For now please join us in praying for the following:
  • The decisions we’ll be making and conversations we’ll be having to reach those decisions.
  • The birth mother(s) we’ll be working with, her heart, and her decisions.  It will most likely be an open adoption where we will know her and she (and possibly the birthfather) will stay a part of our child’s life.
  • The child we’ll be adopting.  For adjustment, health, and joy.
  • That the timing of our match and placement would be right, and that it would happen this year.
  • That we will not have failed matches or failed placements, so our hearts can be protected from further hurt and disappointments.
  • That we will use the waiting time to prepare and grow.
  • That families will come forward to foster children in our area.  Our hearts are so heavy for this, but since the goal of fostering is to reunite children with their families we feel that it’s not the best situation for us right now after loss.  But we see such a great need!

 

I’m sure that many of you will have questions, but there is not much more that we can share at this time.  At this time we’re set with an agency and not actively searching for a birthmother on our own, as some couples do.

Thanks for praying.

We aren’t doing much fundraising at this time, because the amount we need to fund may depend on several factors, but I will be making and selling t-shirts that will go towards our adoption.  Some will be adoption themed, and some are coffee themed (surprised?).  Check out the shirts and order them here: etsy.com/shop/TreesAndFlowersCo    More styles will be added soon!

I’ll share more on Facebook and Instagram if you want updates, or you can sign up for blog emails below.

 

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