I've been meaning to write down the details of our adoption ordeal {I mean story ;o)} for sometime now. As it appears there is a light at the end of the tunnel I'm going to attempt several installments, finishing with a pick-up of our new daughter... that's the plan at least! So here goes!
When Bryan and I were first married we were very interested in the idea of adoption. Both of us knew adopted kids and really like the idea. While in HK our first few years of marriage we saw several couples in our social circle adopt locally from HK, and the process was easy and very affordable. We kind of put the idea of doing the same on the table for a few years down the road. You had to have been married at least three years and be more than 25 years old to apply... When the time came closer to think about starting a family we decided to try to conceive for a few months first and if that didn't happen we would just start the adoption process. And while during those months it seemed everyone around us was getting pregnant, we did not. So, not to worry, we went to our first adoption meeting in the fall of 2006.
It all seemed good, so we began the process, paperwork and interviews... by the end of May 2007, our family was in the Hong Kong adoption "pool". They call it this because there is no order to the matching of families and kids. It is not based on wait time, but on the best fit for each child as they see fit. We were told that local Chinese families would be given priority over us, but we had seen many of our other "white" friend adopt and were not concerned. I didn't not return to teaching in the fall, thinking any moment we would have a baby...The months went by... with no good news. The matching panel was every other week on either Tuesday or Wednesday { I can't remember} I do remember being on edge all morning of those days though, thinking the phone could ring at any moment...
Then surprise! In the fall of 2007, after about 6 months of no adoption news, I found myself pregnant. We were shocked... and then greatly disappointed when we had a miscarriage just a few weeks later. We talked about how we were feeling discouraged on the adoption front {no one else we knew had waited this long!} and how maybe the surprise pregnancy was God telling us to try again to conceive... AND.. two weeks after my miscarriage D &C, we did conceive Jack. We saw the positive pregnancy test the day after Christmas 2007. We had stayed in HK that Christmas thinking we would have a newly adopted child and not be allowed to travel. It ended up to be a good thing because that positive pregnancy test started the beginning of a very difficult and unstable pregnancy. Our Jack is a fighter though and by 20 weeks we knew we had to tell our adoption agency.
You are not allowed to be pregnant and still say in the adoption pool.. So after 9 months of waiting for the call, in the spring of 2008 we took our name out. I was excited to be pregnant but very sad about the loss of the adopted child I had been planning on and praying for. We were told when Jack was 9 mths we could put our name back in.
So that's what we did. When Jack was 9 months old we got back into the local adoption pool. Our new social worker told us that our chances were even more slim now as we had a biological child, which lowers you in the priority standing here. We had also come to realize over the past year, that in the years since our friends had adopted the situation was very changed and it was very rare for a foreign family to be given a child. We knew several other families, who like us, started the process, waited and waited and eventually took themselves out of the situation... we were hopeful that something would work out for us though and so began to wait again...
After another 9 months of nothing.. even with a more expanded child preference sheet {we were open to older and more special needs this time around} it didn't seem like it was going to work out....
Next time....
looking into overseas adoption..
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