Choices, Choices, Choices

Are you hoping for a boy or girl?  What age child are you hoping to adopt?  Are you adopting from another country or from the US?  Are you open to siblings?  What if the birthmother has a history of mental illness in her family?  What sort of prenatal care will you accept or not accept?  What about transracial adoption?  What about special needs?  Are you open to communicating or meeting with the birthparent?  If so, under what conditions and for how many years?

It’s almost overwhelming to think about all the decisions that need to be made regarding adoption preferences (I just counted them up – 45 decisions about our preferences!).  And all of these decisions feel so unnatural – you never expect to have to decide on your child’s gender or age or origin.  It’s truly a bizarre feeling.

Our first decision had to be whether we wanted to adopt internationally (from another country) or domestically (from the United States).  The answer to this question determined which program we entered at our adoption agency, what documentation was required, what training program we attended, etc.  For us, this was a simple decision – but explaining it hasn’t come so simply. 

We are adopting domestically.  Most likely, our child will be from Maryland, although he or she could be from anywhere in the US.  Why?  We simply didn’t feel called to adopt internationally.  Many of the people we know who have adopted have done so internationally (from China, Russia, and Ethiopia).  We admire them and their reasons for adopting internationally immensely.  For us, though, we didn’t feel any peace about it.  Instead, we really felt compelled to adopt from the US.  So, we entered the domestic program at our agency, and the rest is history!

Stay tuned for more posts about other choices we’ve made about our preferences…   

The WHY...

Lots of folks wonder WHY we are adopting.  Are we not able to have biological children?  If not that, then why are we doing it?  Why go through the long, invasive, frustrating, and expensive process?  Read on to find out...

When we first got married, we thought we would wait two or three years before having kids.

A few years later, we still didn’t feel ready to start a family.  And a few more years later, we were even more convinced that we weren't ready.  Not only was the idea of kids unappealing, but we were truly terrified of being parents.

Oddly enough, though, the subject of adoption started popping up – and kept popping up.  We knew several other couples who had adopted or were in the process of adopting.  Someone posted an article on facebook about adoption.  We learned that several of the kids who attend the school where Jeannine works were adopted.  It seemed like everywhere we turned, we were hearing about adoption.

The more we learned about adoption, and the more we talked about it, the more we became convinced that this was the way that we were meant to build our family.  Along the way, God really worked on our hearts to give us a desire not just to have kids, but to adopt our kids.  We finally decided that we were ready to being the process when we were "ok with being terrified." :) 

Before we close, let us more clearly address the "are you ABLE to have biological children?" question, which is the most common assumption about why someone would adopt.  As far as we know, yes, we are able to conceive.  However, we never really tried to do so, so could be completely wrong about that.  God had a funny way of working so that before we were even ready to think about growing our family, we were convinced to do so via adoption.  Providential?  We think so.

Love,

Jason and Jeannine

Specific prayer requests:

1.  That God would be preparing us to be parents

2.  That God would be preparing the right child for us

3.  For wisdom and strength for the birthparents of our future child

4.  That our homestudy would be approved (we should know sometime in the next week or two!)