Officially Official

Well after hearing about our crummy beta we officially announced our intention to adopt yesterday. It was going to come out anyway because I had mailed the announcement letters last Thursday. Fortunately nobody got them in the mail till yesterday. So we sent a mass email out and also posted in on Facebook. So far we've gotten pretty positive feedback so I'm really looking forward to this. I've posted our announcement letter below. It's pretty lengthy because I wanted to make sure I answered everyone's basic questions about adoption in the letter.

On a side note, I've got about 4 1/2 boxes of Endometrin if anyone wants them. I'll split them up so I'll ship 2 boxes to someone and 2 1/2 boxes to someone. First come, first serve. And to the person who requested the What to Expect book and The Infertility Cure book, I'm sending those out this week, I promise! The boxes I bought were too small for these books. Anyway, here's our announcement:

Dear Family and Friends,

As many of you know, Brandon and I have been struggling for years to have children. Our attempts to build a family have included many cycles of fertility treatments, all which ended in heartache and disappointment. Now we’re excited to announce that we’ve closed the door to fertility treatments and opened a new one which will lead us down the road of domestic infant adoption. We’ve been discussing this option for almost a year now, doing our research so that we would feel comfortable with the process and confident in the agency we have chosen.

That agency is called American Adoptions and is a nation-wide adoption agency based in Kansas. We chose this agency because it allows us to continue the adoption process if we move due to the military. We also chose this agency because of the excellent treatment that birth mothers receive and the recommendations that adoptive parents and birth parents have made. Because they work with birth mothers across the US they tend to have a shorter wait time for placement. 75% of adoptive couples only wait 1-6 months before being matched with a birthmother and 3-9 months before bringing their baby home.

Brandon and I have been hard at work for the past few months getting through the adoption and homestudy process as well as decorating our nursery. We’re almost finished and we hope to become an actively waiting family with our agency by the end of October. Based on our personal preferences, our child could be any mix of Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian or Native American but will most likely be Caucasian or Hispanic. They could be born in almost any state (including Alaska or Hawaii), requiring us to stay in that state for up to two weeks until the court has processed the paperwork that will allow us to travel across state lines. Our adoption could be semi-open, meaning that we send pictures and letters periodically to the agency who sends them to the birth parents or it could be open which means that we would have open communication with the birth parents directly (including occasional visits). Closed adoptions are very rare. Regardless of how our adoption is set up our child will always know from the beginning that they are adopted and this is a topic that will be regularly discussed with them.

Just like with fertility treatments, adoption comes with its own kind of risks. Depending on what state the baby is born in, the birth parents do have a timeframe where they can change their mind. This timeframe can be anywhere from 1 to 10 days after the baby is born and of course any time before the baby is born. These situations are known as “failed adoptions” and only happen about 20% of the time with our agency, mostly occurring after the baby is born when emotions are running high. The failed adoption rate may seem high to you but it’s actually quite low compared to other agencies because of the therapy that birth mothers receive and the fact that our agency will not match us with a birth mother unless they feel confident that she is at peace with her decision.

We have never been so excited or so close to becoming parents and we can’t wait till the day when we bring our little one home!

Much Love,

Brandon and Christa

Not flesh of my flesh,

Nor bone of my bone,

But still miraculously my own.

Never forget for a single minute,

You didn’t grow under my heart

But in it.

--Author Unknown