Becoming Adoption Savvy!

Ok all! This post is a “preaching” post. So prepare yourself…

For any of you that know Jerry and I, you know that we don’t like to do anything normal. First, we met on the internet…10 years ago when that was rare! We dated long distance for a year and knew we were ready to be married, so we planned a wedding in 5 months (a big wedding) while I finished my last semester of University in Texas! One of our mottos is "If everyone else is doing it, do the opposite!" Of course with in reason! :)

We started building our house 2 months before we were married, but we have waited more than 8 years to bring children into the family! For those of you that ask why… we wanted to be ready for them and stable, financially. We hear a lot of “you’ll never be ready” comments… we don’t believe it! Not for a second! It always amazes us that so many people say such negative comments about having kids… we always wonder “why do you have them then?” But yet for years the same people have bugged us, “when are you going to have kids?” The weird thing is that we know that these folks love their kids and would never change the fact that they DO have children, and their children bring them the greatest joys in life! So why all the negative comments!?

By now all of you know that we are in the adoption process times two! Wow! Now we really hear a lot of strange things! Because of course everyone assumes that if you are adopting you can’t have “your own”… wrong answer!! Oh dear… I have had comments like “I wish I could just share my fertility…” as if they are sorry that we are adopting. There are upwards of 70,000,000 (70 Million) orphans in the world and 100 million homeless children! For our Christian world, in the Bible we are told to care for the widows and the orphans! Because we are so hard-headed in thinking that the only way to have a family is by our own pregnancy, sometimes God allows us to have fertility problems in order to take care of some of his other children! Another comment is, “it’s too bad there aren’t any babies available in the United States.” Most of these orphaned and homeless children are not in the U.S of A.

We are on a mission in life! To help as many orphans as possible… and do you know we feel blessed and so privileged to be traveling this path! We are amazed the God picked us for this from the beginning. Jerry was adopted as a 5 week old infant and I felt called as a young child, to adopt and care for orphans around the world… when we married, our dreams joined forces. Everything we have done in life has led us to this point for amazing reasons!!

Not that it is anyone’s business why and how we grow our family, but: No we did not have fertility problems, and yes these babies we are adopting are our own! Yes, we may try for biological children at some point, but when, we don’t know, it depends on God’s plan for our family. So, no more of that nosy question, “are you going to have your own?” It is a little offensive… God adopted us, are we not HIS OWN? Yes we are! That is the way we feel about our children in the adoptive community!

We are excited that God chose us to adopt our children from the other side of our world. We are honored that He chose these specific children for us, even though we don’t know them yet. It amazes us that these children will be so perfect for our family! We are not upset or disgusted by the fact that we “have” to travel half way around the world to go get them. We feel blessed that we will learn so much about the Countries that birthed our children. In spite of what everyone thinks, these countries do care what happens to their children, that is why we are required to be approved to “have kids,” by being finger printed multiple times for the office of Homeland Security, local county and the FBI and countless other "checks" on us as indeviduals! They do not want someone adopting their children that do not really love them and will abandon or abuse them again. When we have our children in our arms all the pains of “labor” will not matter anymore! We are looking forward to enjoying the most exciting years of our Life!!!!

Ok some new vocabulary! These are the main ones that we hear a lot.

Please say Biological childen (not “your own”) And Birth parents (not “real” parents)


The children we bring into our lives will be our OWN REAL children!

September Secret Pal Gift!

Our DTC July 2006 group also has a Secret Pal program…
Of course there are all sorts of mystery surrounding this one! So I can’t say too much! I sent my secret pal her gift this week. I hope she loves it… it was books! Hee hee… Our theme was books, so that was not a real clue!

I received, weeks ago, already a box with 4 books in it!!!!! My secret pal was fast!!!! Here is a picture of the ones she sent!!! We love them! They are really good too!

Thank You!!!!! Whoever you are!

August Cyber Shower!

In July after we sent in our Dossier to China, I joined a Yahoo group mainly for people with a DTC of July 2006. This is a wonderful group of people! There are roughly 204 people that have joined us to pass the time until our referrals come next year!
Every other month we have a Cyber Shower. We are matched with someone in the group, we send them a shower gift for their baby and they send us one! It is fun and exciting to get these gifts! Mostly because we know these other women care a lot about these babies that we are waiting for! We all understand how each other feels while we wait!
In August my Cyber Shower Pal was a very sweet lady named Jo Brabham. She sent me a travel pillow, with the little eye cover (so I can sleep on the plane), a book to help us learn Mandarin Chinese, and a yummy bag of pink and white Jelly Bellies! We ate the Jelly Bellies and forgot to take a picture of them!

THANK YOU JO!!!!!