We Are Adopting!

Hallelujah! We can finally share that Aaron and I are planning to adopt! I feel like I have been keeping this excitement and happiness a secret, and can finally let it out!

This has really been a long time coming for us as we had started talking about it at the end of last year. Our initial reaction to our research was that it was complicated, and way too expensive to do. So, we continued with fertility treatments. (Surprisingly, that is the cheaper route to a family)

But the idea of adoption really sat with me and started growing in my heart, even as we struggled through our infertility. In February, while still going through our second round of IVF, I joined an online support group for Domestic Infant Adoption and talked to a couple of friends that I know have gone through the adoption process. After our second cycle failed, I started to read through the stories of those that have adopted, and what that experience has been like for them. It gave me some sort of hope that I really don’t think I had through all of the failures we endured trying to have a biological child. Before we even started our third IVF cycle, I felt like I already knew that we belonged on the path of adoption.

I think the inertia and extra embryos we had frozen from our previous IVF cycle kept us on the track of treatments, though, even though we both knew going into our third cycle, it didn’t feel quite right. As we all know now, that third cycle was hell. I didn’t feel my heart quite in it, often even thinking to myself that I wish it would just hurry up and end so we can get started with something that might actually work. The hormones and emotions were awful, and still make me cringe to think about it now. But after that cycle was cancelled, Aaron and I grieved what we knew was then behind us, and got to work with figuring out how to make adoption work for us.

And what a busy time that has been! Finally, even though just at the beginning of this new process, we feel happier and just SO ready to start this new chapter together. It makes me tear up just trying to think of how to explain how RIGHT this feels in comparison to what we were doing before.

I just got to the point with infertility that I felt like I was fighting the diagnosis so hard, and wasting so much energy on it…and I eventually realized I could be utilizing that energy building my family another way.

Even if our kids don’t share our genetics.

It really just doesn’t matter to me anymore. You come to a point in that journey, I think, that you realize that it is the love that we have to give to another person that does matter, and I just really can’t wait to give that to our future child!

So, we hired our social worker and we knocked out our home study, which is step one of any type of adoption process.

We are officially ready, and legal, to adopt!

Our adoption is going to look a little different than a normal adoption through an agency, and we will be relying on all of you (yep, you read that right!) to help us get the word out and help us find our family. There will be plenty more coming on that in the next few days, so stay tuned.

But for now, we are just going to take a moment to celebrate with each other, because…Holy smokes, WE ARE ADOPTING!

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