How did we get here?
When I was a very, very young kid, I told my mom that I wanted Chinese children. She told me that I would have to marry a Chinese man. So I did. I was not looking for a Chinese man, but when J came along, I found him so irresistible that I married him!
I have always known that I would adopt one day. When I was in college, before I even met J, I did a speech on a vision that I had of my life where I would have a house full of children of different ethnicities. I've never really seen my future any different than that (although when my 2nd child was born and I had 2 children under the age of 2, there were times when I didn't see how I could ever take care of more children LOL).
A school trip to India really confirmed that dream even more. I saw so many children who were hungry and naked- begging for food. Don't get me wrong- India is a beautiful country. There are many other aspects of India that are wonderful. But this particular part was very sad to me.
J and I have talked about adopting since the very beginning of our relationship. We've always agreed that one day we would. It seems that "one day" is now!!
Why did we chose to add to our family through adoption instead of birth?
During the months following the birth of our second child, our daughter, we went back and forth about where to go from there with our family. We thought of not having more children because for a couple of months we were getting like 3 hours of sleep a night! But, who were we kidding? We were made to have a house full of children and there is no denying that. So, then the question was- do we have another child by birth or do we go forward with our wishes to adopt? We went back and forth about this for several months.
Together we read the book Living a Life of Fire by Reinhard Bonnke. This is the autobiography of an amazing evangelist who has brought millions of people to Christ. I encourage anyone and everyone to read this amazing testimony. You will be floored at what you read. So, while we were reading this, I was also reading Christine Caine's book Can I Have and Do It All, Please. Both of these books have a common theme... finding God's purpose for your life. It is completely coincidental (or seemingly) that I was reading both of these books at the same time while trying to find what road to take next. What I mean is that I didn't plan this.
During this time, I had been praying desperately for God to allow me to serve Him. I knew that there was something God wanted me to do- I just had no idea what it was. Day after day after day, I had this gnawing feeling inside of me that would absolutely not go away. This lasted for months. Just about every day, I would beg God to reveal to me what I could do for Him. J and I both agreed that we know that part of God's plan for our lives has to do with children- but was it mentoring. foster parenting, adoption, supporting people who were doing these things, volunteering at different programs in our community???? We considered each of these and came to the conclusion several times that we would adopt and/or foster parent- but not now.
I tried to be settled about this. I tried to find other things to pursue to fill the void that this nagging feeling was leaving me with. But the only thing that I kept going back to was adoption. I begged and begged God to give me peace about our decision to wait and to take the desire away from me for now. But, God does what He wants to do!!
So, I thought that I may as well start researching so that when "one day" came along, I'd be ready! I spent hours and hours reading and researching about adoption. If you've looked into adoption at all, you know how overwhelming all of the information is!! At first we thought we'd adopt domestically through a wonderful agency in our city. Still, it didn't feel like the right path to take. Then we considered India. I thought we were settled on adopting from India "one day" but it still was not quite the right fit. Then, we found out that we could adopt from China and get the process expedited so that we wouldn't have to wait quite as long as non-heritage families. We spoke with someone at our agency who told us that even Chinese heritage families have to wait for up to 6 years! That is way too long- we could adopt 2 children from India in that amount of time!!
Well at this point, I was pretty set on adopting from India. But, I could tell that J was still not completely at peace about it. He really preferred China for a few reasons. The main reason was that he believes that our child will feel more comfortable with our family. Also, J felt like he would have more of a connection with our child since he grew up in Hong Kong and is Chinese himself. We had a wonderful experience early on in our marriage where for 2 weeks we babysat a little girl adopted from China while her parents were in Europe. She and J had an amazing bond. She absolutely loved him and I think she stole a piece of his heart :0)
Do we wait up to 6 years to adopt from China or do we go with India?? I presented this question to several people including my new friend R who is adopting from Russia, a yahoo group that I am a part of, and a person at our agency. All three sources gave me the same answer: China's special needs program.
I did some research on the "special needs" and was floored at what they call special needs!!
However, for several reasons, we have decided to adopt a baby boy from Korea. We will be open to very mild special needs. We've done a lot of research and feel that we are not able to handle special needs that are not mild now- bc we will have 3 very young children when this adoption is finalized! yayyy
