How Did We Get Here?

GOOD QUESTION! We still haven't figured that out ourselves but I'll try to recall what I can. We had toyed with the idea of having a child for a couple of years but never seriously. We knew there would be difficulty becoming pregnant and that there probably would be complications even if we did. The risks that could be involved with mom and baby were ones we were not willing to take. So we had somewhat decided to adopt before we ever decided to "just do it."

Still, we never did definitely decide we were going to do anything other than look into our options. For a few months we researched everything we could from domestic adoptions to international, from newborns to older children, costs, tax credits, health of children, etc. and learned much of what we needed to know if we wanted to get started.

Why an international adoption? There are multiple reasons, for us. For one, we did not want to expose ourselves to the even slightest chance of a birth parent changing their mind at some point. Another reason was we were uncomfortable with the growing trend of "open adoptions". For those who don't know, an open adoption is one in which the birth parents basically have visitation rights. To what extent is negotiable but for us, we just weren't comfortable with that. Now before all the open adoption activists start jumping our case, we recognize the importance of knowing birth families and are not uncomfortable in that aspect, but, again to us, the situation just didn't seem like a good fit.

We were drawn to China pretty early. As far as international adoptions go, the children are healthy, the process is relatively streamlined, and the costs are lower. Some countries required people to stay there for up to 8 weeks or make multiple trips within a couple months to process the adoption and that wasn't very feasible for us. China just requires a 2 week trip.

But how did we get here? We always felt that we had too much to offer to go through our lives with just the two of us. Somewhere along the way (and we each blame the other), we told ourselves we'll never feel ready so let's just buckle down and do it!