A new direction......

After quite a few months of frustration, discussion, research, thinking, and more discussion, we've made a decision. Chris and I have hired a lawyer and we're going to attempt to do a private adoption. A private adoption means that we are not going through an adoption agency, but we are going to try to find a pregnant mother in the U.S. who wants us to adopt her child. This doesn't mean that we're stopping our China adoption- this will continue. We have been in this process for 2.5 years and we could possibly wait another 2 years. Add all of that on top of the time we've already spent trying to build a family and we would love to see some progress. So, we are doing both at the same time.

We would love to match with a birth mother this calendar year, and then match with a Chinese baby in 2009 or 2010. This could mean that both children are around the same age, or that the second baby ends up being younger than the first- we really don't care. We know that the CCAA requires a certain amount of time to elapse between children entering a home, so we could have to go on hold with our China referral- or, worse case scenario, they could drop us from the list entirely. We felt that because we are not guaranteed a child in the China program- too many things are changing in the last couple of years, we'd at least like to start on another process.

Many things could happen this year- the China program could speed up, it could take a long time to find a birthmother- who knows what else! We have understood for a very long time that the phrase "family planning" is an oxymoron in our household.

So, friends and family, in the next month or so, you'll start to hear an awful lot from us- because as good old Hillary says, "It takes a village". She meant that it takes a village to raise a child- but we're going to need a village to find one. According to our lawyer, networking is the key. Everyone we know and meet, and everyone our friends and family know will soon find out about us and our search. This makes me pretty uncomfortable, because it is advertising intimate details about us to perfect strangers - but if that is the way this is going to happen, then so be it.

We are in the process of renewing our homestudy (it expired a long time ago with our Chinese adoption), putting together a "dear birth mother letter" which is basically a 2 page note that can be given to potential birth mothers expressing our interest in adoption, writing ads to go in the local and possibly national papers, a website www.chris-and-megan.com will be up soon (maybe end of Feb?), etc. The process is terrifying but it is also exciting to be trying something new.

Wish us luck!

(By the way, is it inappropriate to point at pregnant womens' stomachs and ask "Hey, are you going to keep that?". Just wondering. :) )