Having kids

I try not to talk about having kids much anymore with people I know.  I think people just get tired of hearing "Oh yeah, kids kids kids".  It gets to be too much for a lot of people, especially people who have never had issues having children, and who wants to burden your friends beyond what they can handle.

As a result, I often sit on my hands and just wait until we have something to announce before talking about it.  Well, right now, we have a beginning step to announce.  We are finally updating our damn homestudy.

We started trying to adopt in 2010, right after we exchanged rings.  So our first homestudy was done in December and we immediately jumped into any avenue we could to start our family.  We worked with the foster system (and ended up not pursuing that route for multiple reasons, but we hope to open this avenue at some point in our lives), we looked through children already available for adoption from adoptuskids, and we finally settled on private infant adoption.  Only we found so many problems with the system.  We worked hard to find a good homestudy agency and worked twice as hard to find, what we thought was, a good child placing agency.

Our first adoption attempt took us to far from home!  How exciting to get the call that the baby was born, was a beautiful and mostly healthy little girl, and that we needed to hop on a plane and get out there to meet our daughter. Only it didn't happen like we thought.  We arrived in her state, we made it to the city of her birth, and bright and early the next day we arrived at the hospital... only to be told by the NICU nurse that the mother changed her mind.  We were so stunned.  Yeah, we knew that was a possibility, but we had spent so much time making sure we were doing this right, ethical, properly, that we never dreamed we would be left sitting in the waiting room with empty arms.

We called our placing agency and they called the hospital and it all just fell apart.  We sat in the hospital for a couple hours, waiting to speak to the risk supervisor and the hospital social worker and the lead NICU nurse... and we watched the baby's mother invite people in to meet the baby.  We listened as people had conversations next to the nursery door about how awesome it was that the baby was born.. and we realized at that moment that maybe mom never planned to place.  And our world was shattered.  We were so naive, and no we weren't anymore.  The world taught us an expensive and heartbreaking lesson that day.

So we came back home and rebuilt our life here.  We stayed out of the adoption game for almost a year, despite wanting a child so desperately.  We healed ourselves before jumping back into the arena, with the same placing agency.

Thus began our second attempt.  This attempt was more fraught with despair from the beginning.  We were matched quickly and the baby was due not too long after we matched.  And then the little boy was born and we learned that from the beginning we were being scammed.  Through our agency.  Not by our agency by any means, we are not indicting them publicly at all.  Needless to say, that fell through as well.

From there we dropped our placing agency.  Two failed adoptions and the bullshit we dealt with during our second failed attempt just showed us that this agency wasn't for us.  After giving ourselves time to heal from this second placement, we opted to go for surrogacy and all that entailed.

To avoid this post becoming too long and depressing, our transfer failed.  No baby, no children.

We tried a few other things, but right now those are too personal to throw up in public on a blog.  We have healed, but we aren't ready to spend too much time talking about them.  I am not ready... I should use I and not we sometimes.

And that leads us to today, where we are right now.  And we are nervous.  But we are excited.  We have found a new placing agency that we feel conducts itself ethically and we have few expectations this time.  It is scary to deal with all this shit again, but also exciting.

So one of the goals of 2015 was to have children.  This is mostly outside of our control, but we are taking the steps we can and hope that 2015 will continue to be our year.  We won't give up because failure is not really an option for us.  2015 is the year of goals and dreams coming true.

Until Next Time.