Tim and Jeni

This has changed a bit sense we started.  Hopefully it won’t change again.  Here’s our process & where we’re at:

We took Steps 4 & 5 in reverse order.  And Steps 6 & 7 can happen simultaneously.  We are right at the beginning of our home study process.  Meaning, we haven’t even gotten the homework.  This is the part of the process where the agency & state pry as deep as they want to into our lives to see if we’ll be fit parents.  I’ve been told it’s very intrusive.  We’ll see.  As far as I understand, it involves a lot of questions with essay-style answers, and at least 2 in-home visits each from the agency’s worker and the state’s worker.  Our house will have to pass safety & health inceptions.  We’re working on that.  We basically have to do the home study process twice: once with Antioch & once with the state.  This is the one thing I hope they do change before we’re through.  It is extremely silly that the state insists on doing a study of their own.

I realized that many of our family have not been in the loop.  This is my attempt to fix that.  Up until this point, none of this has been widely public.  Meaning I have not said anything on facebook.  Please respect that and keep it off of there until I’m ready for all my peeps to know.

Welcome to the “Adoption” section of our blog.  To make it easier to keep up, you can follow the RSS feed.  If I’m good, I’ll keep you up to date.  I’ve thought about starting this a lot.  The problem is that I don’t know exactly where to start or what to say.  So, I’ll just start typing.

I guess I should start at the beginning.  We’ve been trying to conceive for 4 ½ years now.  After the first 18 or so months, we talked to my doctor.  She did a few basic blood tests, and put me on Metformin^*.  Six months later we started seeing a specialist.  We went through treatment for 18 or so months.  Last December we decided to stop.  If you want to know specifics about all that you can ask and I’ll answer.  For the sake of those who aren’t at all interested, I’ll skip the details.  What are our options now?  We could keep “trying” and/or adopt.  We chose and.  Yes, we would still love to have a baby.  Obviously, we have no control and it seems like God is saying, “NO.”

So, adoption.  We’ve been thinking about going this route for a long while now.  The original idea was to have one or two of our own, then adopt.  When having our own began to seem just out of reach, we started considering moving adoption up on the priority line.  It got to a point were we could pay thousands for a procedure that gave the chance of maybe having a baby, or paying those thousands and be guaranteed a child.  It began to feel selfish to want our own blood, when there are so many children who want and need parents.

We did some research on international and local adoptions.  The amount of money it was going to cost repulsed me; especially international ones.  It feels like foreign countries are selling their unwanted children^**.  The words that I have said over and over when talking about abortion kept coming to mind.  “If you just have your baby, I’ll raise it!”  So, we decided on local.

We had heard of an adoption agency that allowed people to adopt for free.  Amazing.  So, we started looking into, and decided to go with Antioch Adoptions.  Keep in mind a lot of this thought process was happening alongside fertility treatments.  Please don’t think that we stopped treatment and then jumped into adoption without spending tons of time thinking/praying about it.

I think that’s a decent summary to start with.

^* No, I’m not diabetic.
^** I understand that at least part of that $$ is to protect their children from being placed in horrible people’s hands.  But still, $25,000?!?!?