We got THE CALL.

I was upstairs getting my son who’d just awoken from his nap, so I didn’t hear my phone. Our caseworker immediately tried my husband’s number.

“Is this what I think it is?” he asked her.

“Yep.” she said.

A birth mother had chosen us. Continue reading →

Five years ago today, I said goodbye to Corporate America after a nearly 17 year career there.

I definitely miss it at times.

I miss the travel; I miss the income; I miss the socialization; I miss the mental challenges of it; I miss being part of a team and part of something bigger; heck, I miss getting dressed for work and living in more than a t-shirt and jeans every day (assuming I even make it out of my pajamas).

Because let’s be real here, the world doesn’t give a lot of love or a lot of credit to stay-at-home moms. Continue reading →

I forgot how traumatic the adoption home study is.

I guess I blocked it out. Maybe once I held my son and knew he was ours, all those memories vanished from my mind.

But we are right back in the thick of it.

And I hate it. To the point of tears.

I’m just glad my child is asleep right now, because the expletives that are slipping from my lips are not appropriate for him to hear. Especially at this age where he parrots almost everything we say. Continue reading →

Do you watch This Is Us? It’s the only TV series that we follow in this house.

If you’ll recall, my husband is a television editor here in Los Angeles. Since he makes TV all day, the last thing he wants to do is come home and watch more of it. So ours is rarely on when Daddy is home.

But he makes an exception for This Is Us, and he and I now watch it together.

I was turned onto the show last season when a friend (and fellow adoptive mom) mentioned that I might want to check it out. I watched the series premiere one night while Jeff was at work, and I bawled my eyes out. I immediately made him watch it with me again when he got home that night. (Okay, he willingly participated, but you get the idea…)

I think it’s obvious the adoption theme on the show is relevant to us, as is the idea of raising a child of a different race and everything that goes along with that.

My husband also gives props to the writing and the editing (he knows more about all that Hollywood stuff than I do), and we just really enjoy the show overall.

So how does this relate to our adoption story? Continue reading →

Private domestic adoption is expensive, and it’s only one of many ways to add a child to your family. Why would we choose to go the private adoption route versus foster-to-adopt, or seeking an international adoption, or trying to find a birth mother on our own?

It all depends on your reasons, and there are about as many reasons why people adopt as there are people who adopt.

For some, they’ve felt a call to it all their lives. For others, they know the need that’s out there to find homes for countless children in need of them. There are same-sex couples who can’t biologically have children. And there are single people who have always wanted children but never found the right person to start a family with, or they just want to go it alone.

For us, infertility was the main driver. And that’s a common one. Continue reading →

“He is SO cute! What is he?”

I looked at the woman blankly for a second. I had a feeling I knew what she meant, but I still asked, “What do you mean?”

She stared back at me with a smile on her face and eventually asked, “What’s his ethnicity?”

We were standing at the sink in the restroom of a restaurant where my family and I were just finishing lunch. We were looking at each other in the mirror as I hoisted up my son to the sink and held his hands under the faucet to wash them. Continue reading →

We’re getting back on track to move our adoption forward.

First up, reviewing and signing the 20-page contract with our agency, then filling out their client info sheet. In addition to the usual questions of name and contact info, the client sheet also requests things like age, ethnicity/religion, employment info, annual income, driver’s license numbers, answering if we’ve ever been arrested… and so on.

In addition to all that, some other things we have to consider and questions we have to answer right off the bat include: Continue reading →

Unless you are close to someone who has adopted, chances are you haven’t heard some of the frustrations that can go on behind the scenes, the dead ends that can be hit, or the ugly details that you’d never otherwise know.

Coming back to our situation with the international birth mother…

The more we learned about her scenario and learned from our agency about how this all might play out, the more bleak the prospect of moving forward and succeeding with this placement began to look. Continue reading →

Our adoption journey has taken an interesting twist, and I’m going to tell this story without disclosing identifying details about the parties involved. So bear with me here…

Two days ago I was contacted via Facebook by a friend who lives out of state. (If you want to widen your birth mother pool, make it public that you are looking to adopt. You never know who will remember seeing that when they hear of something and come back to you.) Continue reading →

Today is my son’s second birthday. Last night, my husband Jeff and I were discussing exactly what time Levi will turn two (i.e., what time he was born).

Ironically enough, my phone died last week, and I am currently using an old one until I figure out getting a new one. This old one happens to have the text exchanges I’d been having with Levi’s birth mom leading up to and shortly after his birth.

Our birth mother had a false alarm the day before her baby was born. We were effectively on call though, as her due date was 9/20/15. We went to bed that Friday night of 9/18, and for whatever reason, I awoke in the wee hours of the night (which I almost never do). I thought that while I was awake, I should check my phone. I saw two texts that had come in a few hours earlier that read, “At the hospital” and “Water just broke.” Continue reading →