A little more info

I wanted to just add a little more information about the whole adoption process.  I think that many people are under the impression that when a couple is trying to adopt through an agency they are put on a list and when their name comes up they get a child.  This may be the way it used to work long ago, but it is rarely that way now.  As I said in my last post, the birth mothers are given profiles of couples to look at and see if they find a couple (or family) that they like.  Even before the birth mothers get the profiles the agency looks at what the birth mother is looking for in a family and then looks at the families that are waiting.  Each potential adoptive couple has to fill out a grid of what they are willing to accept in a birth mother or a baby.  One major factor is race.  At this point we are only open to caucasian and caucasian with Hispanic as well.  This is just a personal preference for us.  We are also looking to adopt a newborn, but we may be open to a baby that is up to 6 months old.  There are also many other factors that the agency asks you to consider.  The categories on the grids involve drug and alcohol use, mental illnesses, cigarette use, and many other diseases or illnesses that can be both genetic and not.  It is unfortunate that most domestic adoption situations will involve some sort of drug or alcohol use.  Surprisingly the use of drugs (even major ones like cocaine) is far less damaging than alcohol.  Alcohol use is very damaging, even if the birth mother got drunk once while pregnant.  Matt and I are very open on our grids, meaning that we are willing to accept many risks.  However of course we would rather (just like everyone else) find a birth mother that is healthy and will potentially have a healthy child.  No one can predict what a child is going to be like whether the mother used drugs and alcohol or if she did everything she was supposed to during her pregnancy.  I always tell my friends to look at my situation.  I did everything I was supposed to do during my pregnancy.  I didn't even eat chocolate because of the caffeine (boy was that hard) and I still had a premature baby.  You just never know what's going to happen.
Hopefully I have given all of you a little more info about the whole adoption process.  Please let me know if you have any questions about adoption or about our personal experience and what we are looking for through the adoption process.

Introduction

I wanted to start this blog to tell my adoption journey story.  Almost four years ago, my husband, Matt, and I received the greatest gift in the world, our son, Ben.  However, Ben decided that he wanted to come into the world early and was born 3 months premature.  He had a long and fairly complicated stay in the NICU.  After 100 days in the NICU Ben finally came home.  We are thankful that he is doing so well now.  He is a happy and healthy little boy who absolutely LOVES music.  Ben enjoys playing instruments, singing, reading books, playing outside, and terrorizing our two cats :)  Ben also loves babies.  If we see a baby anywhere he automatically gravitates to them and wants to talk to them and play with them.  Matt and I figured out pretty quickly that we wanted another child.  The one thing that scared us however is the chance of having another premature child.  Also when I had Ben I had a placental abruption which can be life threatening.  Luckily mine was not severe and it turned out fine.  After speaking to many doctors we came to the conclusion that it would be too risky for me and for another potential child to try and have another biological child. 
We decided to turn to adoption.  We selected an agency called Adoption STAR and have been active with them for over a year.  When you are working with an agency to adopt they have birth mothers who want to place their babies for adoption come and look at profiles of potential parents.  The profiles are like a scrapbook that tells about the lives of the couples.  We have been profiled by birth mothers about 8 times.  We did get matched with a birth mother, but unfortunately this match was not the right one for us.  Matt and I have been networking on our own as well to try and find a birth mother.  We have not been very successful.  I recently got an account on facebook as well to try and spread the word.  Now I have created this blog to try to spread the word even more and to give people a chance to get to know my family and our story. 

Not all of my blogs will be this long, but I felt the need to tell my story up until this point.  I will keep this updated on the latest events in our adoption journey.  I encourage you to spread the word for us.  Give our information to everyone you know and tell them to then pass it along to everyone they know.  Our website that is linked on this blog shows many pictures of my family and has information on how to contact us.  We would appreciate any help you could give us on our journey.  Thank you!