Background

Welcome to our new blog!

Our purpose here is to keep everyone posted on our adoption journey, and after it ends, on the progress of our little family. A pre-"mommy blog", if you will. Since we’ve asked our friends and family to join us on this journey (by way of asking for their help at http://smartraise.com/FilanowiczAdoptionFund) we thought it would only be fair to include everyone in the process. Hopefully this won’t just be all mundane updates, but I’m not making any promises.

We have had a lot of support and been given some great advice. Of course our families have been amazing. Early on I was concerned that perhaps they wouldn’t feel comfortable with this. Not even close. Everyone acted like it was silly to even ask if this would be an issue. I know not every family is as loving and accepting as ours are…and that’s all the more reason I think our home and our family is worthy of being an “adoptive family”.

I know people are sometimes curious about what has lead us to choose adoption, but I don’t think it is so important to discuss how we came to be at this juncture. The fact is we want to have a family, and this is how we’ve chosen to make that happen. Are their other ways we could make this happen? Yes, there are, but ultimately this is the path that’s right for us. This is how it happens in our life story. At least so far as we’ve written it.

So, once we picked this path we started researching. We thought that we really wanted to adopt from foster care. Unfortunately we also really want to adopt a young child, and those things just aren’t super compatible. Not to mention we’re just not prepared to take care of a child and then have to return him to his family. Maybe later, when we have a child or two, and that piece of our puzzle is intact, maybe then we can open our hearts to be broken like that, but right now we just can’t.

That ruled out one kind of adoption, but left so many more still to choose from. That’s really what’s so hard about all of this…there are SO MANY choices. And, that’s great…and also overwhelming. We have decided not to adopt abroad at this time either. There are risks associated with adoption, regardless of where you adopt from. We weighed those risks, and decided that we felt more comfortable with the risks of a domestic adoption than those of a foreign adoption.

So that’s where we are. We’re working on figuring out the finances. We’re interviewing agencies and lawyers. We’re trying to figure out the path from here. All the while weighing in our hearts and minds all the myriad of other choices that come along with this journey. From this side of things it seems we have a mountain to climb, but I certainly don’t doubt that anything thrown at us will be worth it in the end. And, of course, I also know that this will be nothing compared to actually parenting a child. And I can’t wait.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. Thanks for just listening. Thanks for asking how you can help. Thanks for signing up on our fundraising website. Thanks for everything.

-Melissa