Sorry for the long blog silence (I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 months!) We’ve been praying long and hard about what type of adoption to pursue and it’s taken me a while to come to terms with the answer…. 
I must admit I had gotten a bit caught up in the idea of the adventure of international adoption and so I was a bit slow to accept the decision to pursue one more domestic adoption first. We’re still interested in going the international route in a few more years, but we’re going to let our first two kids grow up a bit first – not so much for their sake as for ours:
Feb.1,2010 - Just born!
As we’ve been learning, parenting is something that takes a lot of figuring out and on-the-job training and we’re just now experiencing the “terrible-twos” for the first time. We could use a bit more experience with the various growth stages before we attempt to adopt slightly older children. I was willing to attempt the challenge, but my poor husband reminded me that children still terrify him sometimes and I have to give him the chance to grow into it.
This is also our last chance to adopt a newborn – most agencies give preference to families with less than 2 kids in the household. Continue reading →
We have been really praying and struggling through the different options and choices to be made before we can even start the adoption process. I’ve even been praying that God would help us know what the right questions are! We really feel like he has put adoption on our hearts again right now for a reason and we thought that it might involve an 
international sibling group from Latin America, but a lot of our research has been rather discouraging. We don’t want to get discouraged by naysayers, but neither do we want to be foolish and bullheaded. We just want to start down whatever path God sends us down – we know that we can trust Him to take care of all the details along the way.
Please be praying with us as we try to figure out which direction to take the first step. We just want whatever God wants. Thank you for your continued prayer support!
Continue reading →
For those of you reading this blog because you want to be part of our adoption journey: this post is more for those interested in adoption themselves. Not a lot has changed for us since my last post – we’re still praying hard for direction, so please do keep praying with us! I’ll post a bit more about the questions we’re struggling with next week.
In the fine tradition of my husband, I decided I would
write book reviews about the adoption-related books that I read. I recently finished skimming the book Adoption: The Essential Guide to Adopting Quickly and Safely by Randall Hicks. The author is an adoption attorney and does a very good job of describing the whole adoption process. This is one that I wish I had read 2 years ago during out first adoption. The book wasn’t quite as useful at this point since it has quite a broad focus with only one chapter on International Adoption (although I got some good direction on choosing an agency from that chapter.)
The first chapter asks the question “Are you Ready to Adopt?” – I really liked his perspective and it does a good job helping you answer that question from motivations to the various issues adoptive parents face. Continue reading →
This post gets into detail about the specific decisions facing us right now in our adoption journey. Again, the goal is to give you all the chance to be more intimately involved in this whole process and to have specifics to pray about – and also to give others considering this journey a peak at our decision making processes in the hopes that it will help them with theirs. Feel free to skim this lengthy post down to the prayer requests at the bottom or if you like this kind of detail, read the whole thing!
Once we decided to pursue international adoption, we have been facing the daunting task of choosing a country and an agency before we can even begin the process. There are no agencies in our area that can do both parts of the adoption so that means using 2 agencies – one nearby to do the home study and one anywhere in the U.S. to do the international part (which these days means being Hague Certified.)
Thankfully, we already have the first agency chosen from our domestic adoption 2 years ago – having found them through multiple personal referrals to begin with and having had a good experience with them ourselves. So we started our search for the international agency on A New Beginning’s International Adoption webpage (ANB). That narrowed our broad search of all the international agencies in the country down to the 5 listed on that page – we could still look elsewhere and ask ANB to network with the agency of our choice, but this makes the task much less daunting and lets us start with agencies that share some of ANB’s ideology (a definite plus!) Of the 5 agencies on the list, only 3 do any adoptions from Latin American countries, so that narrowed our search even further.
Continue reading →
Baby Smiles
Nearly 2 years ago, we adopted a local newborn and have enjoyed learning to be parents. As he approaches his 2nd birthday, we have been praying about continuing to expand our family.
We went to a Steven Curtis Chapman concert a couple months ago as volunteers with his adoption-assistance organization, Show Hope (which gave us a grant for our first adoption.) While there, we got to hear more about his huge heart for international adoptions and the need to find “forever homes” for so many orphans all over the world. Ever since then we have been praying hard about where God wants us to go for our next child.
Before, I’d kind of assumed that we’d adopt another local baby since the last adoption was such a success, but now we’re seriously researching international adoptions from Latin America (since we have such a connection there from all our mission trips to various countries.) Latin America is not the easiest place to adopt from and one of the things that often keep people away from those countries is that they all require a fairly lengthy stay in the country to finalize the adoption before taking the kids home.
Continue reading →
