Adoption

Those of you who know us, know how much we advocate for ADOPTION!

With this being Right to Life Weekend, I figured this was an appropriate time to post about my thoughts on adoption.
Although, we have 4 biological kids (soon to be 5), we also have an adopted daughter from China, named Luanna. Adopting her was one of the most exciting, scary, exhilarating, difficult, yet rewarding things that Ken and I have done in our marriage. I keep thinking that if more people would choose adoption, we could really cut down on the number of children who are forced to grow up in orphanages or foster homes, with no family to call their own, and feeling unwanted. Both international and domestic adoptions are great and necessary! We chose international because we found international (esp China) adoptions to be much, much easier and quicker to go through. Even though we had to do a ton of paperwork, we did not have to deal with complications from birth parents and social workers and the adoption was very quick. Once Luanna (formerly Lu Yan) was placed in our arms last December, she was ours. Because she was a waiting child and considered an "older" toddler (infant adoptions take longer), our adoption was complete within a year (paperwork and homestudy included). We started seriously looking into adoption and doing our homestudy/paperwork in early January 2006, were matched with Luanna in August 2006 and traveled to China in December 2006 to get her.

Like us, there are a lot of families out there who are choosing adoption. Not because they are infertile, and see adoption as the only way to have a child, but simply because they want to help an orphan find a better life, and they have the love and the means to provide for that. Some families are choosing adoption once their biological kids are older teens, which is great too. Here is a story about a family like that...they live in Atlanta and they recently adopted a 3 yr old boy from China. They have 3 bio kids, who are teens. They are on one of my China adoption email lists. Here is their story (see link below), which was in the Atlanta newspaper...complete with a slideshow. Get out your kleenex! Enjoy!

www.ajc.com/living

There are soooo many kids waiting out there.
Choose Life. Choose Adoption.