Our Adoption Story - Part 1

I've been going back and forth with this, thinking about how much information I want to share. I guess the holes that I leave will be filled in with time. Out of respect for the birth mom, I won't go into too much detail about her situation. Hope you enjoy!!

In April 2012, Eric and I went to the Kansas City Infertility Awareness Conference. We were able to choose a few seminars to attend, and one of them we chose was an adoption seminar put on by a local adoption agency. The speaker was very negative toward adoption and how difficult/expensive it can be. Eric and I left the seminar with the feeling that we NEVER wanted to adopt, or at least we would try IVF ten or twenty times before even considering it. It was pretty disappointing and I can't believe that speaker was ever chosen. 

Fast forward to June 2012, Eric and I received disappointing news of an early miscarriage YET AGAIN regarding our IVF cycle. Our whole infertility journey has been a series of disappointment and heartache (but I'll go into that more in another post). The news really put the nail in the coffin for me, and I started seriously questioning why this was happening to us. How could we be so close to having a baby, and then it gets taken away in a blink of the eye? Would I ever be able to carry a baby to term? Not to mention, the cost of IVF is crazy and does not offer any guarantees. Out of nowhere, I got a strong feeling that I needed to consider adoption. This was definitely weird, because as you recall Eric and I were sort of anti-adoption at this point, so I knew the thought was an impression and I needed to follow it.  

I told Eric we needed to consider adoption and I think he was thrown off a little, but after a few days he agreed to move forward with it. Being the over-achiever that I am, I immediately booked an appointment with LDS Family Services so we could get started right away. As I recall, we met with our caseworker a week or two later in the beginning of August and learned what we needed to do to qualify and complete our profile. LDS Family Services tells you that the average wait time to adopt a baby is 2 years. Wow! For an impatient person like myself that was an eternity. He also told us that completing our profile could take up to a year, it just depends on how fast the couple wants to move. Well, I wanted to go as fast as possible, so we worked our butts off getting our background check, filling out paperwork, answering lots of questions, having our home study, and completing our letter to the birth parents. It was so great to actively be doing something instead of waiting and waiting, and we were officially "online" in 3 months at the end of October. Being online means you are searchable to birth parents all over the country and the caseworker will show your profile to prospective birth parents. 

We went months without hearing anything, and then finally in February we got an email from a birth mom!! We were so nervous responding, but it didn't take long for me to get a bad vibe about that arrangement. I knew it was not the right baby for us, so Eric and I treated our emails as practice for future birth moms. A couple days later she told us she was going in a different direction, which we were expecting. A couple weeks later we got another email from a birth mom that was due the NEXT MONTH. We were so shocked. The more we learned about that adoption, however, the more we knew it wasn't the opportunity for us, and we told her our feelings shortly after. 

After emailing with those two birth moms, I was really frustrated. Why couldn't we just hear from the right birth mom? I became anti-adoption again more to spare my own feelings. Protecting my emotions by pretending not to care is how I made it through a good portion of the past few years of infertility. 

Eric and I went on living our lives and pushed adoption to the back of our minds. If we heard news then great, but we tried to have zero expectations. On May 14, 2013 Eric called me at work and told me our caseworker needed to talk to us. I stepped outside and Eric joined the calls so the three of us were all on the phone. The first thing our caseworker said was that he knew our profile mentioned we would be willing to adopt a baby 6 months or younger, but would we consider an older baby? I was really thrown off and kind of speechless (I didn't even know LDS Services dealt with older adoptions). Our first response was exactly how much older would the baby be? The caseworker went on to explain that she was 8 months old and has been living with her birth mom. The birth mom was going to place her for adoption at birth but changed her mind. After raising the baby for awhile, she realized it would be in the best interest of the baby to be in a more stable environment. 

We were given about two days to figure out if we would be interested in pursuing this adoption. Talk about pressure! Eric and I talked and prayed that night. We really tried to trust in our feelings. Although we were scared and nervous, we never had any negative feelings about the situation, and we didn't want to wonder "what if" or have any regrets, so we just said to ourselves, "Why not see where this goes?" There was still time for us to back out if we didn't feel good about it, and the birth mom could always back out as well. 

**Stay tuned for Part 2 (Meeting Kinsey)**