Advice about adoption

I found this list on someone's blog and thought I would share it and comment on how we handled these things.

1.Get your ENTIRE family on board before you begin. There will be bumps in the road.
We didn't need to worry about "convincing" each other. We were both 110% on board the moment we felt called to start the adoption process.

2.Consider your birth order and do not change it easily. I had been set from the first moment that our adopted child would also be our youngest. I don't know why, but this was how I thought.

3.Consider an older child as well
I thought about this for a moment. . .but went back to wanting "as young as possible." However, God had other plans.

4.Realize that you are not in control and that God has a plan. He just needs obedient followers.
This was HUGE for us! Since I had my heart set on a young child it took true obedience and seeking God to know we were called to accept a referral for an older child. If I hadn't had an open heart to the Lord I would have passed up that referral. Soooo glad I was in tune to Him.

5.This adoption is not about you getting children, but rather children getting parents.
This was our feeling from day one. It's tough and it can't be selfish. It HAS to be about the child. This is why I didn't request a girl. I knew God was in control and would bring the child who needed us the most. I couldn't try to control it.

A thought provoking quote

"Sometimes I'd like to ask God why He allows poverty, famine, and injustice in the world when He could do something about it...but I'm afraid God might ask me the same questions". ~Anonymous

A post from Dave...yeah, really

We have been visiting with a lot of friends and family since we have been here in Seattle and often the subject of our adoption comes up in conversation. I feel like I have told our story so many times. But it's great to have so many people interested in our adoption and ask us questions and genuinely want to know whats going on with this part of our life. It's interesting, because there are some standard questions that everyone asks: What made you decide to adopt, why international, why Ethiopia, how much will it cost, what is the time line. Sometimes people will ask more questions which is great, but those are the basics. What I find interesting is the order that people ask questions, and the ones that make people feel most awkward.

One of the questions that I think about a lot is "Why Ethiopia." Not because I question our decision, but because it just seems so natural to me now, that I can't imagine why it wouldn't be Ethiopia. That's where my baby is! We have known that Ethiopia would be where our baby would come from for so long that I think of them and pray for them as an Ethiopian baby. God has called us to adopt from that nation and so how can we not go and bring our baby home?

I know some people don't fully understand the answers to some of the questions they ask. That's ok. Kami and I are not ignorant to the many many struggles that lay ahead of us in this adoption process and then our life as family born on different continents. It's ok if life is hard sometimes. God doesn't always call us to do the easiest thing. He calls us to do what He needs us to do. God knew it wouldn't be easy for Moses (an interracial adoptee) to go to Pharaoh, and it wasn't easy for Paul to stand before Festus, but they where faithful and obeyed God and did the hard thing. I don't want to just live a safe easy life ignoring God's call. Our life might be hard, we may face struggles we haven't even thought of yet, but thats ok. Sometimes it's the hard times that draw us into the closness with God that we desire.

Why Ethiopia? Because there is a beautiful, wonderful, amazing child there, created by God and that He ordained to be our child from the foundations of the earth. We will be coming to get you soon baby!

This Christmas By Toby Mac

Joy to the world
Let heaven and nature sing
Let heaven and nature sing

Now Jonnie never got his wish on December 25
That's what he said when he left the orphanage
9 years old, but Jonnie was an old soul
Gonna spend his first Christmas in a real home
Showed me a picture that he drew the night before
Was a picture of a man standin' outside a door
I asked him who it was and he said someone I only
see in dreams
Comforts me when I cry myself to sleep
Father of the fatherless
Be with your sons and daughters this Christmas
This Christmas
Believe in angels?
Jonnie asked me starin' at the sky
I said I do and saw a sparkle in his eye
Big brother for the weekend respondin' to the season
Took the chance that givin's better than recievin'
Two nights, a new family, some holiday cheer
We laughed and sang
Came on a midnight clear
We gave, recieved, and as we headed to close
We looked to the heavens and it started to snow
Down blessings
Father of the fatherless
Be with your sons and daughters this Christmas
(You ain't livin' til you choose to give love and joy and
peace to one of His)
Father let us not forget
The children who are all alone this Christmas
(You ain't livin' til you choose to give, you ain't livin' til
You choose to give)
(James 1:27)
Religion that God our Father
Accepts as pure and faultless is this
To look after orphans and widows in their distress
Merry Christmas everyone
Joy to the world
The Lord is come
Let heaven and nature sing
Let heaven and nature sing
Let heaven and nature sing
Let heaven and nature sing
Believe in angels Jonnie asked me starin' at the sky
I said I do and saw a sparkle in his eye
9 years old, but Jonnie was an old soul
Gonna spend is next Christmas in a real home

Two days of training in Idaho Springs

We're home from two 8 hour days of adoption training. We were nervous about it cause he had to take Gabriel with us. He's fairly high maintenance compared to Liam at this age. He doesn't always nap well in other places. SO, we just didn't know how the weekend would go. Gabriel did fabulously well!! He napped in his pak'n'play in a little office during our training and never even cried before falling asleep. All the other couples loved him. He was a very good boy. We went back to the hotel and got A LOT of rest. We were all asleep by 9:45. I know, we are old fogies now. LOL We had a long week this past week with house sitting for some people and taking care of their three teenagers and 6 year old. We NEEDED the sleep.

The training was great. A lot of it wasn't very applicable to us as it was about domestic adoption and about getting a baby at birth. Things are very different when it's a domestic adoption vs. adoption international like us.

One big difference is whether or not you can meet the birth mom. With domestic you get to choose if you want it an "open adoption", "semi-open adoption" or "closed adoption". These terms refer to the level of involvement the birth mother will have in the life of the child. We learned that in a lot of ways it's a GOOD thing to allow some involvement. This minimizes your child growing up with hard questions and someday going to search for their birth mother. I think most of the other couples in this training came thinking they would want it as closed as possible but they left today feeling like openess is the best choice.

After this training I realized that it will be difficult that we may not know anything about our baby's birth parents. We may never know what they looked like, health history, their story. We may have no answers to the questions our little one might have. I know the Lord will work through those things and offer healing to our baby in other ways. He is good! He is in control!

We are SOOOO close to being able to finish our home study. We need to finish our online training (we should get it done this week), Dave needs to get back to the doctor for his BP test so his physical can be complete, we need to meet with our social worker one more time, and we need to read a book and write a short paper on it.

Email we received from our pastor

Greetings,
Came across this passage this morning in my sermon prep. Thought of you guys.

Rob

Ps 68:4-6

4 Sing to God, sing praise to his name,
extol him who rides on the clouds —
his name is the LORD —
and rejoice before him.
5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
6 God sets the lonely in families,
he leads forth the prisoners with singing;
but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.
NIV

people who get excited with me

Today I got to talk with a few friends about the adoption. They hadn't heard the news so they were excited and asking a lot of questions! I can tell when someone asks questions because they are simply unsure of what else to say or how to react. These dear friends were very obviously thrilled and asking questions only because they truly wanted to know the details. Numerous times they said they were so happy for us and thought it was wonderful. I need to talk with people like them to keep my spirits lifted. It's so different when my belly isn't growing. People don't 'notice' when we make progress towards the day we are united with our baby. Some people just have a hard time grasping the 'why?' in our choice to adopt. No one ever asked us, "why did you get pregnant?" when we announced Liam or Gabriel were on the way.

You MUST watch this!!

Due to the security of the Ethiopian orphanage I needed to take down the link to the video I mentioned in this post. However, if you are still interested in watching it (it's seriously beautiful!) email me and I can send you the link. I just can't put it on the Internet.

This made me cry with such joy. I literally was sitting here sobbing as I watched this video. It is an American family in Ethiopia (where we're going!) picking up their baby boy and meeting him for the very first time. It's powerful!!

a NY Times Article

So I was reading this article on the NY Times site. It was called "Overcoming Adoption Racial Barriers".


The following little paragraph broke my heart. I know we will see some of this and we have to prepare ourselves. It just makes me sad that kids have to go through

Judy Stigger, a counselor at the Cradle (an agency in Chicago) and herself a white adoptive mother of two black children, now adults, makes the issues tangible to prospective parents by relating personal stories. She tells about the time when her son, then a teenager, reached into her purse at a McDonald’s and a clerk called security; and the time when her daughter began crying while looking through congratulatory cards sent by family and friends when they took her home. “Was I supposed to have been white?” her daughter, then in the third grade, asked. Ms. Stigger had never noticed that the children on all of the cards were white.

Four Things About Adoption

I found this on a different adoption blog and thought it was really neat. The lady who wrote it has adopted 4 kids from Ethiopia and two from Korea!


Four things about adoption

Four things I thought about adoption when I was a child--
>I imagined it might be cool to be adopted by someone really rich (you know, in those moments when my mom wouldn't spring for those Calvins I had my eye on)
>I imagined what I'd do if someone left a baby on my doorstep
>I couldn't understand how anyone would ever be able to relinquish a child
>I thought it might be neat to adopt a child myself someday

Four things I've learned since then--
>That adoption issues are incredibly complex
>That most birth mothers have their children's best interests at heart and are doing their best with terrible circumstances
>That there are huge numbers of kids in the world waiting, many of whom who will never have a family
>That the privilege of adoption has been an incredible blessing to my family

Four silly things people have said to me about adoption--
>How much did they cost?
>Do you have any real kids?
>Didn't their real mom want them?
>Are they sisters?

Four things that are hard about adoption--
>Waiting
>Waiting
>Realizing that many people would have been able to parent their own biological children if only they'd had the right support at the right time.
>Facing your child's grief and loss issues, and feeling sad when you can't make all their sadness go away.

Four ways my adopted children have surprised me--
>With how soon they began to ask adoption-related questions
>With their resilience in the face of huge upheaval in their lives
>With their similarity to me in various ways
>With the way they have completely and utterly captured my heart

Four things I wish everyone knew about adoption--
>That getting educated about adoption issues is way more important in the long run than worrying about the paperwork.
>That there are millions of awesome kids in the world just waiting for families
>That the funding will come if you just jump in and do it
>That parenting adopted kids is just as miraculous and wonderful as parenting kids born to you.

Adoption as a Ministry of the Church

I wanted to share this:

https://www.kingdomkidsadoption.org/292282.ihtml

Adoption as a Ministry of the Church

James 1:27 says “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

The Greek word for “look after”, “episkeptomai”, does not merely mean to go to see, but to relieve the problem. Not a shallow term, it implies a commitment to fully meet the needs of the person to whom we are ministering. James indicates that this type of commitment is an outpouring of a heart determined to follow the Lord rather than the world’s standards.

It is every believer’s responsibility to care for orphans, not just a select few. If we truly believe this, in every church there should be families ministering to “orphaned” children in a variety of ways. While some families can welcome a child into their homes, others can help make this possible financially. Still others can provide respite care or make physical modifications of the church facility.

The method a family chooses to minister to children needing families isn’t as important as the fact that we all should be ministering to these children in some way. The love that we lavish on these children will be both a testimony to the world and an opportunity to show our love for the Lord.

Ultimately in the day of judgment “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” – Matthew 25:40 (NIV)