Yesterday Blake and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. It was truly the perfect night. The restaurant was amazing, it was delicious and had a great atmosphere, and our conversation was so perfect that the 2 hours of dinner went by very quickly.
Among our other great points of conversation, we talked about adoption and we came to a decision that we are both really happy with:
we are going to wait a year before proceeding. :-)
I know it seems like I am changing my mind every post or so, and we shall see if it changes again, but we talked about how we both still really have a heart for adoption, but we would really rather not have involvement with the birth parents, especially for our first kids.
We might still decide to go through foster care, and just do adoption of kids with parent rights already terminated, but we are now leaning way more towards international adoption.
The money was my #1 hold back, but I think if we save for a year, it will be easily feasible and not hurt our savings (which it would at this point). This also gives us another year to just enjoy the two of us (because life is awesome right now), and another year where I might still get pregnant (might be kind of a let down at this point lol) or confirm that we really should go through the adoption route if it doesn't happen.
I am still super nervous about that much traveling (our top choices are from African countries, so we are talking about 20-24 hours of travel time to get there), but I know that it will be worth a few painful days to help out a child in need.
Blake had an amazing rebuttal to my reluctance to spend money to adopt when local kids need it more: the worst off foster kids near us have it much better than the ones we would be adopting from African countries. When I look at it that way, I don't feel like I am "abandoning" the local kids to help other ones far away, I feel like I am going to where there is a bigger need first. And if the money and travel puts me off, then how many other potential parents are completely put off by it, so these kids won't get homes?
I wish I could give every kid a home who needs one, but the fact is that we can only help some. So... we need to decide who we are being called to help. I got a sinking feeling hearing about how much birth parent interaction would be required with the concurrent adoptions, and I got a sinking feeling thinking about how much of our savings would disappear to adopt overseas right now, BUT I got a great feeling thinking about saving for a year and then adopting, so that's what path we are taking steps towards now.
It is entirely possible that our plans will change in a year again, or change along the way, all we know is that at this point, we are content with just us, saving money, moving towards possibly adopting internationally. :-)
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