Welcome!

If you have found our blog, then you've already heard our wonderful news! We are officially on our way to becoming parents of a precious little girl from China.

We wanted a way to keep friends and family informed about where we are in the process so that you can share in our excitement! We've never blogged before, so we will do our best to update whenever we have news regarding our adoption.  We know the process will be long and we wanted to be able to keep everyone up to date as we reach various milestones in this journey.  We also thought it would be a nice way to keep a record of our thoughts and feelings throughout this process so that we can share them with our daughter someday.

For those who are interested, here is a little background on our decision to adopt:

If you know us well, you may already know that Carrie has dreamed of having a daughter from China since before we even started dating.  Michael has also wanted to adopt ever since he spent a year as a social worker between undergraduate and law school.  We discussed it while we were dating and then again during our pre-wedding meetings with our priest.  Carrie would have been fine with adopting all of our children, but Michael wanted the experience of having a biological child, so we decided to do both.

For the first few years after we got married, we focused on getting our house and our finances in order so that by the time we had our children we would be completely ready for them.  About four years into our marriage we realized that we will never be completely ready, so we should start our family anyway.  We began trying to conceive a baby and were disappointed to discover that deciding to have a baby didn't mean it was just going to happen as we had planned.  We tried for about two years, with no success.  We discussed seeking professional help, but Carrie felt that God was calling us to adopt sooner rather than later and if He wanted us to have a biological child, it would happen naturally.

After some preliminary research into both domestic and international adoption and a lot of prayer, Carrie approached Michael and was surprised to find that he was very open to the idea of looking into adoption. He agreed that there was no reason to postpone our adoption just because we were trying to conceive a baby.  We were always planning to adopt someday and we were ready to become parents as soon as possible, so it just made sense to move forward with an adoption and if God chose to give us a biological child as well, we would welcome it as an extra blessing.  We decided to leave the timing up to God and to follow what seemed to be His plan for our family.  We would begin the journey to our adopted child.

Carrie knew she wanted to adopt from China, but Michael wanted to explore all options and choose the best country from a logical, factual standpoint, rather than following Carrie's gut feeling.  Carrie agreed to help Michael research all of the possibilities even though she knew in her heart where we would eventually be led.

After countless meetings, seminars, webinars, conference calls, internet research, sorting through piles of literature, watching DVDs and speaking with various agencies, we began narrowing our country choices.  We agreed that the best options for us were Vietnam, Columbia and China.  As of right now, the US government is not allowing adoptions from Vietnam, and we don't know how long they will be on hold, so that option was out.  Columbia seemed like a good choice and they would even allow us to adopt a sibling group, but Columbia doesn't allow first-time parents to designate a gender preference and we both desperately wanted a daughter.  So that left China.  Needless to say, Carrie was ecstatic.  So much so that she didn't even feel the need to say "I told you so" to Mike!

So, once we decided our future daughter would come from China, we needed to choose an adoption agency.  We spent many more hours attending webinars, speaking with representatives from various agencies, and contacting reference families to learn about their experiences.  We quickly agreed on our placing agency and have never questioned our decision.  Our agency is awesome.

The best part of researching agencies was meeting dozens of parents who have already adopted children from China.  We were blown away by the support and encouragement we received from every single person we spoke to about adoption.  We were excited to adopt all along, but our excitement reached an all-time high after hearing about the amazing experiences of others who have gone before us.  Everyone is so enthusiastic about their adoptions and their beautiful children and they want as many other people to share in that joy as possible.  We are thrilled to be joining such a wonderful community of adoptive parents.

We realize that adoption seems strange to a lot of people who can't imagine loving a child as their own with no biological relation to that child.  But we feel strongly that this is something we have been called to do.  In fact, our mutual desire to adopt is one of the things that attracted us to one another in the first place.  And we know for certain that we will love our adopted daughter just as much as we would if she was born to us.  We think it will be amazing to raise a child from another culture and to incorporate her Chinese heritage into our family.  We want our daughter to be proud of who she is and where she comes from and to know that she was chosen to be part of our family.  Most of all we want her to know that she is loved beyond measure.

As we begin this journey to parenthood, we are excited and hopeful, but also somewhat terrified.  There are a lot of steps in the process and we're just getting started.  It may be eighteen months or more before we finally meet our daughter.  The waiting will be difficult, but we know we will get through it and that in the end we will have our daughter in our arms.  The struggles we go through to bring her home will all be forgotten the moment we are united as a family.  We can hardly wait!