Welcome to my blog!

The beginning of our journey

Welcome to our new blog! I was just about to start a new blog, when I saw that I had started one awhile ago! Of course, I never posted to it so I totally forgot I had done so. At any rate, I am hoping to start this blog in an effort to write down all our feelings and happenings throughout our adoption.

Chris and I finally made the decision to adopt our third, and final, baby from Korea. It has been a lot of talking, a lot of thinking and a lot of prayer to come to where we are now. We had started the process about 18 months ago to adopt from Guatemala, and when that fell through, we didn't know what to do. Do we continue on with adoption? Do we try for a biological child? Do we take it as a sign and just be happy with our quaint little family of four? A lot of questions, and honestly, we had no answers. Now that I think about it, we see that all this time God was behind us, showing us that our child was just in another country. We have found that country, and so now we begin.

So why adoption? You must be thinking, you have a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl, why adopt? I am getting that question often these days as we start telling our family and friends our big news. Let me start off by saying that adoption was in my heart since I was a little girl. I don't know why, but I always just fell in love with adoption. I remember when I was a child talking to a girl in my class who had been adopted (from Korea now that I think about it), and I was in awe that her parents were Caucasion and she was Asian. Then I would see informercials for adoption in the middle of the night at sleepovers with friends, and I would stay awake thinking of all the children that were growing up in orphanages. I would worry about it often. See for me, it wasn't one thing that lead me to this choice. It was just a natural thing in my eyes. Something that I knew in my heart I would do one day. That day is NOW!

So why did we come up with Korea??? Well, we started off with Guatemala, as I mentioned earlier. But Guatemala was closing and I was feeling very rushed to get our paperwork done. So we pulled out of Guatemala (just in time as I think we would be caught in the Hague mess that is going on now) and we started researching other options. Our research took us all over the world, from domestic adoption to Russia to Kyrgyzstan to Taiwan to China to Korea.

So why Korea? Well, first off, the health of our child is very important to us. We totally understand that by adoption or by biological means, there are no guarantees in life. A child can get sick or hurt at any time in his or her life. We understand all of that, and we continue on with that in our minds. But Korea's medical doctors are very skilled, just about equal to the United States. We feel confident that if something was majorly wrong, the doctors in Korea would be able to share this with us so that we can enter the adoption with our eyes wide open. Second, the children in Korea are in foster homes. We feel this is very important in the bonding process. We know from speaking with our agency that the foster mothers take very good care of these children. For that we are thankful and we could just never pay back our foster mother for taking such good care of our child. Third, we know that Korea is a long standing program with a lot of resources around for both us, the adoptive family, and for our child as well. We personally know people that have adopted from Korea, and I think that will be important to our child when he or she is a little older, to have people around that understand what they are going through as an adoptee. Lastly, I like the fact that our child can be escorted home. While I would love to travel to pick him or her up and see first hand where my child's birth country is and what it is like, at this point in my life, it just isn't feasible. With two small kids at home, plus Chris's job, plus Carmela's therapies, I just don't see how we can leave for a week without our children. I really want Chris to take some time off of work when our child is home with us so we can bond as a family, and if he took off to travel with me, then he wouldn't be able to do both. We both agree that it is important to us to travel to Korea one day with our child when our child is a little older to understand about his or her birth country. In the meantime, we are looking forward to reading all we can to understand it ourselves.

So now we are filling out all the paperwork, working on our application still to get it into our agency. My goal is to mail the application late Thursday afternoon. Wish us luck as we begin our journey!