My first post

Hello. This is my first blog, where I actually am going to write something, so bear with me. I want to be able to customize this page, but I need to figure out how first.

The purpose of this blog is to document our adoption journey, as the title might suggest. I thought it was important to document this major life event, since it will, despite how we feel now, go by quickly and I want to be able to look back with our child and see how we became a family.

You may be wondering how Adam and I first got on this path? (wow, I sound so zen) Like so many other couples, we wanted to start a family. I knew that I had fertility issues, and we went to doctors and had tests, and we were told that in order to get pregnant we would have to do in vitro. We then took a break, and really thought about what it was that we wanted to do. Suddenly, an option that I had never really considered before began to take root in my mind; adoption. After much discussion, we both came to conclusion that adoption was the way that we wanted to add to our family.

Then came all the research, and I learned about open adoption. Here is how our agency describes open adoption:

Open Adoption includes birth and adoptive parents meeting one another, sharing full identifying information, and having direct access to ongoing contact over the years. In open adoption, birthparents and adopting parents select each other. They have control over all critical decisions in their adoption, including the amount of ongoing contact.

Open adoption has been the subject of intense study in recent years, and it has been found to be psychologically the healthiest form of adoption for birthparents, children, and adoptive families. Research has shown that the more open an open adoption is the healthier it is.

As someone who doesn't like secrets, this seemed the way to go for us. So we went to a couple adoption seminars, and we then made our choice in agencies. All of this happened at the end of 2008. We were all set to sign up, but we were a bit nervous about the economy, and how slow things were at Adam's job, so we waited. Sure enough, Adam was laid off for about 2 months, luckily it wasn't longer. To make a long story short, we finally signed the contract this past February. Now all the work began......