The Door Is OPEN! Open Adoption. OpenSaysAdoption.

Hey all! We are hoping to raise most of the the $30,000 needed for the initial costs of adoption by July 25th. Donations can be made quick and easy online at our fundraising site. We really appreciate your considering to support us - we truly cannot do it without you!

So last week I made a post addressing the question of "When's the Baby Due?" in which I gave the rough schedule of the adoption process and then established myself as a potential competitor with Merriam-Webster with my near straight up adoption glossary. 

One of the terms that I introduced was "open adoption" which I followed up with a note that I would write a blog post to more fully explain what that term means.

Then I attempted to make a blog post about open adoption and couldn't think of a catchy title. So I opted for quantity over quality and just gave the post 3 crappy titles. Let's hope this post lives up to its quantity title.

And so, here we are.

The concept of "Open Adoption" may be very new to many people, (it was to us!) and it can also initially sound scary (it did to us!). What open adoption means is that the adoptive parents and biological parents get to meet both before and after the adoption placement. It means that, in the most ideal situation where everyone involved is comfortable with it, there might be a continued relationship through letters, phone calls, even possibly visits after the child has been placed in our family.

Psychologists, researchers, social workers (etc.) have all found that a child who is adopted tends to feel more whole and healthier if they know more about their biological parents. I have some completely incidental evidence from adopted friends that would agree with that. Biological parents are also more whole and healthier if they are able to have, at the least, the basic knowledge of the well-being of the child they gave for adoption. There are also a bunch of additional advantages to open adoption that I am going to straight up lift from Cradle website and post here:

Open adoption benefits for the child:

• A clearer sense of identity
• Understanding they are loved by their birth family and why they chose adoption
• Ready access to information about their medical and social history
• Access to biological siblings, if there are any

Open adoption benefits for adoptive parents:

• Knowledge that birthparents chose adoption freely and willingly
• A feeling of entitlement and being personally entrusted to raise the child
• Dissolution of fantasies about birthparents or fear of the unknown
• Greater ability to answer the child's questions about his or her origins
• Ongoing access to birthhparents' medical and social histories

Open adoption benefits for birthparents:

• An opportunity to personally answer their birth child's questions about his or her adoption
• Reassurance of knowing the child is safe and thriving.

To clarify - it does not mean that there is "co-parenting" going on. It simply means that if given the chance, we would be happy to have the child know where s/he came from and not have some sort of "mysterious" part of his or her past for which no one has an explanation.

So, cool. There you are.

And in case you forgot since it was all the way at the beginning of this post - we could really use your help to get started with the process! $

Love, The Garcias

When's the Baby Due?

Thank you all so much for sharing your generosity with us. We are on the brink of meeting our Day 3: $3,000 goal of our $30,000 adoption costs. It makes our dream of bringing home a baby in need of a family seem just a little bit more real. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us start this Next Chapter.

Onward to the blog post. Here's the title of this blog post again: "When's the Baby Due?" Have you re-read the blog title? Yes? Ok.

Well, the short answer is: we have no idea. End of blog post.

Ok, ok. Well - there are timelines and statistics that can give us a bit of an idea of the earliest we might be looking at bringing a new family member into our home. It includes all sorts of new lingo that we are just now learning ourselves. So below I have the rough timeline and belower I have given definitions of all this adoption vocabulary:

The Schedule

July 2015 - October 2015: Homestudy Process

November 2015: Finalize our Cradle profile page

December 2015 - ?: We are listed as potential adoptive parents

...And now for the explanatory adoption vocabulary list.

What's a "homestudy"? 
(July 2015 - October 2015)

A homestudy includes inspecting our home (per the term "homestudy") as well as interviews with us and our parents, the submission of a million pages of paperwork including short biographies about us and our families, and a series of classes that focus mostly on child-rearing in the context of "conspicuous families." After we complete our homestudy we are approved as foster parents.

The homestudy process is kind of like a white glove test,
only it feels a bit more like what this picture implies.

What's a "conspicuous family"?

"Conspicuous family" is a term used to describe an adoption across racial backgrounds. First and foremost, Victor and I want to have our home open to someone who needs a family. In order for us to truly let the "child come first" we are letting ourselves be more concerned about the home we make than the color of our child's skin. What is conspicuous is that the outside world will always be well aware that our child is adopted. I'll post some more about this "conspicuous family" thing later. There is a ton of research and advice about how to be this kind of family. We are going to share this information with you in-depth because it involves all of our friends and family and will help everyone make our child feel a welcome part of our lives.

Profile Page? Is that like adoption Facebook? Whaaaaaaaat?

(November 2015)

A little bit. One of the many roles that The Cradle plays in the adoption process is "matchmaker." In the most ideal scenarios, biological parents come to the Cradle to consider giving their child for adoption and The Cradle presents them with a short list of potential adoptive parents that seem a good match for the interests of the biological parents. Those biological parents are then shown the adoptive parent profile pages which include biographies (created during the homestudy process) as well as a short video the adoptive parents prepare to introduce themselves. If the biological parents pick us, we go on an awkward breakfast date with them so we can get to know one another better. If everyone agrees, we make the match. After that both sets of parents come up with a plan for the placement of the child. This includes how "open" the adoption will be. More on "open" adoptions in another post to prevent this post from becoming a straight up dictionary.

So why don't you really know when the baby is due?

(December 2015 - infinity and beyond)

Because it is up to the matchmaking and selection process made by the biological parents, we could be on the list of potential adoptive parents for a while. That means that we could be accepting a baby into our family right in December 2015, or the following December, or - God please forbid - the following following December...or even later. Last year the median wait time (which begins when the adoptive parent's profile is posted which, for us, should happen in December 2015) was 13 months, while the year prior it was nearly 18 months. And, if you can't remember what a "median" is, ask your nearest 4th grader, because it's a little well, emotionally difficult to describe that math in this context.

And now it is time for a comfort penguin. He is placed here to offset the reality of
just plain not knowing when we will bring home a baby.

Faith, hope, and love (and penguin cartoons) will bring us through the wait period. It will all be more than worth it in the end. But first, we need to be able to begin the adoption process. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us start this Next Chapter.

It's Out!

It's official: The word is out! Victor and I are planning to adopt a bambino in need of a home into our family.

And I am just going to be honest and say that I am so, so, so, very relieved that the word is out. Victor and I have known since before we were married that our family would be completed through adoption. But of course, this is a complicated and difficult topic to make public. And now - it is out there. Everyone knows. And I am just so relieved.

I also feel so, so, so, very loved after reading and hearing the support that everyone gives us in this (now public) decision. THANK YOU ALL for your thoughts, prayers, and help as we go through this process.

And we can just assume that Victor feels the same since he nodded his head in wholehearted agreement to this post before I made it, like our pending adoption, public.

I have created this blog to keep you all up to date on what is going on as we go through the adoption process, tell you about things we learn along the way (we have already learned many surprising facts and statistics!), give you some insight as to what we might expect about our future family member, and also, perhaps, fill you in some more on the story that has preceded our decision to adopt. For friends and family, I hope it will give you the updates you seek. For others who are going through or discerning whether they are going to go through the process of adoption, I hope it will help you.

If you are interested, please follow the blog! I will be posting some more succinct stuff on Facebook, but you can get the more in-depth details here.

To wrap up, here is the video our dog Nigel asked us to post to showcase how he's such a good a puppy brother. It features one of our darling nephews. It also features some odd, unrelated conversation in the background that involves my mother making horror film sounds. Please focus on the former, not the latter.