Writing our adoption story and how we came to adoption is hard for me because it is impossible to fully capture what we felt that led us to adoption and to our son (and maybe/hopefully future kiddos!) but I know how powerful adoption stories are and want to share ours. It is also one of the questions we get asked the most- why did you adopt or how did you come to the idea to adopt? I hope that I can balance both our decision and preparation as well as show how God had his hand in leading us to Toan as well as giving insight into some of what the adoption process looks like. So without further adieu…
Why did you decide to adopt?
Our adoption was a very long time coming. I was always drawn to books where characters were adopted or adoption was involved in someway. In High School, I really started feeling like God was preparing my heart to be open to adopting someday. That feeling kept getting stronger, I even wrote journal entries in high school about how I felt like God was telling me that at least one of my children would be adopted and I looked forward to that.
When Brandon and I started dating, I brought up the adoption thing pretty early on. I remember we were sitting by the lake talking and I think we were both really starting to realize that this person was “the one” and we were having the longest chat about all the serious life topics- jobs, money, where we wanted to live, how many kids we wanted to have, etc. At some point in the conversation, I took a shot and told him that I wanted to adopt someday. I remember being nervous because it was already so important to me, and I was worried he wouldn’t be open to it. Instead, it only made me even more in love with him (so cheesy, I know) when he enthusiastically replied that he had always felt like he would adopt someday, specifically older children or teenagers. Growing up his family had a couple of teens live with them who needed somewhere to stay and it had really opened his heart and his mind that family isn’t just made up of those who are blood relatives.
We knew we didn’t want to wait a long time to have a family, and just a few weeks after getting married, I came across a blog that one of my friends had shared that when I read, I was overwhelmed with the Spirit. The post had nothing to do with adoption, I don’t even remember what it talked about, but I knew I wanted to re-read it, so I left the tab open and came back to it a few weeks later. When I re-read it, I started clicking to the blogs more current post and slowly learning about the family whose blog it was. It turned out that they had 3 biological children, and then had adopted five more from China who had all special needs. They had just gotten home from adding the two to their family and were regularly sharing update post for their friends and family. I must have read for hours just getting to know their kids and these amazing strangers. I loved reading it and I remember feeling the Spirit so strong, but I remember thinking no way is international adoption the path for us. (side note: I have no idea why I wasn’t more open to it then, it had just never crossed my mind. I didn’t think negatively of it, but I had never considered it. So if you feel like that now, maybe God is just warming your heart up to the idea still). Regardless of how I thought our path to adoption might go, I kept coming to back to their blog and reading more. God was definitely working on me.
Over the next few months, I started checking their blog for new post everyday, and re-reading all of their older post from before I had found their blog. It didn’t take long for me to see that God was opening my eyes to international special needs adoption and I couldn’t wait. It became everything that I wanted. People kept coming into our lives who had been touched by International Adoption, and I felt like Heavenly Father was really placing these people in our lives for a reason.We began looking into International Adoption right away.
Our excited research into International Adoption quickly showed us that we weren’t eligible yet, and wouldn’t be for a few years. There are multiple requirements for International Adoption, and a big one is age. Most countries require you to be 30 and that was still a few years away for us. We started planning all of our goals around that one big goal of adoption. To work towards that goal, we focused on learning as much about adoption and trauma as we could, we followed lots of adoptive families blogs, joined adoption groups on Facebook, and worked towards being financially in the right place for adoption. We also knew we wanted to go ahead and start a family while we waited, and we had Sawyer, Rhett, and Ford all in 3 years (looking back, I have no idea how we survived that but I’m so glad we had them close!). 9 months after Ford was born, Brandon deployed to the Middle East for 10 months and we planned to have another baby when he got home and then start the adoption process, the ages of our kids and our ages for eligibility would line up perfectly for China’s adoption requirements (which is where we thought we were going to adopt from).
Without going too much into the details (some are personal and it would need a longer post anyways) when Brandon got home from deployment, we felt really strongly that we shouldn’t have a baby but should adopt instead, but I wasn’t 30 yet. We prayed a lot and researched other countries and just kept coming back to Vietnam. In December of that year, we saw Toan’s picture on a waiting child list and started the adoption process shortly after, specifically pursing adopting him. The week that we saw his file, Brandon encouraged me to reach out and ask for more information. I was hesitant because Brandon was getting laid off in a few weeks (his work was closing their Atlanta office). I was sure that there was no way they would even talk to us, he didn’t even have a new job lined up yet, but I reached out just to see, and in the next four weeks, Brandon had a new job and we were applying for adoption with our agency. God always knows the end from the beginning and I’m so grateful that Brandon encouraged me to reach out, even when I couldn’t see how God was going to provide for us to be able to even start the process.
This was the first picture that we saw of our sweet boy with his Nanny he loves
Once we were approved to view his file, we viewed it and had an International Adoption Clinic review it with us. I remember sitting in a Krispy Kreme parking lot in Atlanta talking through all the medical possibilities and realities for this little boy who just felt so perfect. We turned in a letter of intention to adopt (LOI) to adopt him just a few days later and the rest is history! I’ll do more post on the actual adoption process in separate post.
I hope you enjoyed hearing our adoption story, and next week I’ll be back to share how we chose Vietnam and our adoption agency.
Edited to add: Here is the blog of the amazing family whose blog opened our hearts and minds to international adoption- A Road Less Traveled
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