This blog is the story of the adoption of our son Max.
Jason and I had always talked about adoption. Even before we knew that we wanted a biological child, we knew that we wanted to adopt. We didn't know much about adoption, it just seemed reasonable that if there was a child who needed a mom and a dad, and we wanted to be a mom and a dad, that we might make good parents for that child. When we talked about adoption, we always talked about adopting from China. Looking back on it, I'm not sure where that idea came from, it was just always there. One of my favorite quotes from some other adoptive websites is "Why am I adopting from China, because that's where my child is." And quite frankly, I think that's as good of an answer as any. It just felt right. Finally, the time came in our lives that we were settled enough to start our adoption journey. Through the fall of 2007 we had many discussions about how we should proceed with our dream to adopt. As we were preparing to adopt from China we were getting more and more information on how much the wait to adopt was lengthening through that program. We explored other options to adopt from other countries, but decided that China was where our heart was and began to prepare our paperwork to adopt through China's waiting children program. If you're not familiar with what it takes to proceed with an international adoption, you should check out our timeline on the sidebar of the blog. It details all of the preparation that we did just to get our paperwork to China. It doesn't, however, describe all of the ups and downs that we went through prior to being matched with our child. Some of the highlights are the 5 different caseworkers that quit or were fired while we were waiting, the loss of our waiting child application by our original agency, the loss of accreditation by our initial agency, the subsequent loss of access to China's waiting children program, the lack of information from our original agency on the possibility of regaining accreditation and access to the waiting children program, and the difficult decision that we had to subsequently make to change to a new agency which meant losing several thousand dollars and more importantly starting our paperwork from scratch. However, this turned out to be the best decision that we made because within 2 days of contacting a new agency we had been matched with our child.
