Why We Are Adopting

Every now and then people ask us why we are adopting, it’s not really the kind of question you can just answer with a sentence or two and every couple has a different story, today I’d like to share ours.

Actually, it started even before there was an “ours”, I remember wanting to adopt ever since I was a teenager. I believe God placed a spot in my heart for the orphans long ago, and some how I always knew it would be from one of the countries in Africa (because, newsflash: Africa is not a country. It always surprises me how many people do not know this).

Do you remember those World Vision commercials from long ago (do they still run them?), with the sad little child with flies swarming over their face? My heart broke every time.

I would watch every one of those hour long World Vision shows that would be on, the ones where some famous person would travel around a village meeting a family, visiting their small home, seeing where they had to walk to fetch their water and often pointing out how hungry they were and how the children’s bellies were often bloated from being malnourished.

Often the child they focused on was an orphan being looked after by a grandparent or relative and I just knew I wanted to do what I could to help and one day I would adopt.

I remember tell God, at the age of 15, that I would be okay with being infertile, that he could let someone else who wanted to have biological children have them, I was all for adopting.

A few years after that Jared entered the picture and I don’t remember a specific conversation but I do know that I told him that I wanted to adopt and it obviously wasn’t a problem because we did end up getting married. 🙂

Fast forward a few years and Raeca was 11 months old and recovered enough from her surgery for us to start talking about adding another kid to the mix. Originally the conversation was “let’s have another biologically and then try to adopt”, but after a few weeks of talking we realized that really, the newborn stage was our least favorite, so why try to have another biological child when there are older children available for adoption?

That’s when we seriously started to talk adoption as our next step.

Oh, and one thing you should know about us: when we decide something, we go for it full throttle. We applied with the government by the end of that month and thus began the journey.