Children

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there has been a lot of beginnings for me. When we got married I knew that I wanted children but I wanted to wait about one year. After that we started trying to have kids. After 6 years of things not working as we planned, we decided to adopt. This is that journey.

We had really wanted to have our own children so we went through fertility treatments. After months of pills, one month of shots, a lot of tests, a lot of money for the shots, and only a 3% success rate...all of that failed. We still didn't have a child. The nurse to me, when it was all said and done, "next month we'll do something different." I said "Next month!? There will not be a next month! Not unless you make it cheaper or can increase the odds." And that was that. We knew we wanted children and that more treatments were not the way we were going to get the family we have always wanted. So we looked into adoption.

We had A LOT to think about. International or domestic, white or a different race, what agency, who can we trust to not just take our money and run, how do we find someone who is pregnant that wants to let us parent their child? So many questions. It was VERY overwhelming. We put it off and put it off. Just didn't know were to start.

We knew one couple that had adopted. We met with them one day at their home and asked them all kinds of questions. They said they had gone through Lutheran Social Services. That was it, we were going to go through them too. Turns out LSS had a office about 30 min. from our house.

We met with the social worker, went to a seminar, and decided that this was definitely who were going to deal with. They help with all kinds of adoptions. They said that if we wanted to adopt within the USA, we would have to put in our application and could go into the program to adopt a different race right away. If we wanted a Caucasian baby we would be entered into a lottery, where we might be picked. They turn all the applications for that program upside down and pick some. WE GOT PICKED! What a blessing! We were now in the running for a Caucasian baby!

We went though parenting classes. Those were hard. There was a lot of reading, a lot of homework, we had to drive to their office and sit there for 8 hours a day. Noel never liked school and had a hard time just sitting there. We trudged through. After the classes were done we both thought that all high school kids should go through them and carry one of those electronic babies around for a week. High schoolers would probably never have kids. The classes really make you think about how good of a parent you would be. Noel and I, even after 7 years of a pretty strong and loving marriage,were questioning if we would be good parents!
We had our home study done. this is were the social worker comes into your home and makes sure that it suitable for a child. We passed that but had to make some improvements, then she would be back.
That is were we sit. I will be talking to our social worker on Monday to set a date for her to come back.