Our Forever Child

My husband and I married late in life. He was 48 and I was 40. We wanted desperately to have a child as neither one of us had children from our past relationships. We went through fertility tests and found out my eggs were old and his sperm did not swim as well anymore.

This is where our adoption story begins. After much prayer and thought we decided to check into adoption through the state department of human services. We learned of a 9 year old boy that was in state care through my husband's sister. He was in her sunday school class. This child impressed her so much that she felt someone needed to adopt this loving child. She decided to tell my husband and I about this little boy not thinking that we would really pursue him. What she did not know was that we had pretty much given up having child of our own. I believe God puts you in certain places and situations and this was our chance at having a family.

After hearing about this child, I proceeded to call the local office human services in December of 2005 . Boy were we surprised to learn of what all we had to do to get this child. First, we had to fill out tons of paper work. Then we had to attend orientation. This was about a two week process. We were also visited by an adoptions specialist. He explained what we had to do to start our adoption.

Typical of any state agency, they lost our paperwork. We had waited and waited to hear about the next step and after numerous phone calls we realized that he had lost it. By now its late febuary and we had gotten to know the foster mom who had this little boy . She was very interested in helping us get him and worked with the case worker on his end to let them know of our intentions. Never assume that a case worker for the kids talks to adoptions specialist. We did and it came back to bite us. They do not communicate well about the futures of these kids especially in our state. We had delay after delay for months on end.

In March of 2006, we finally met our future son. This is not how the state wanted to be but it gave us a chance to get to know this child. We fell in love with him. He was so cute, caring, funny and we knew he was going to be our son. About this time we learned that we needed to take classes for several weeks on parenting. Because of the lost paperwork, we had missed the classes at the beginning of the year and we would have to wait till May to begin the classes. We also asked to be assigned to another adoption specialist and things did finally start to move.We attended the classes, got our CPR certification, fingerprints, background checks and jumped through every hoop they asked us too.

We had unofficial visits with our son. Just made us want him more and more. We wanted him to be comfortable with us and our extended family. Again there were delays even after us completing everything for the state agency. We waited from August of 2006 till November 2006 to finally have him officially placed with us.

November of 2006 our son finally came to live with us. Our family was finally complete. We went through an adjustment process getting on a schedule for school and work. It was all worth it to have him with us permanently. The holidays and new year were wonderful. Our families were so excited to have him become part of the family after a year of trying to get him.

In July of 2007, we legally adopted our son. He had our name , our love and became our forever child. There have been some tough times and some really great times over the past couple of years. Adoption may not be for everyone and ours may have taken alot longer than we realized it would. However I cannot imagine our lives with out him and look forward to seeing him graduate high school and college. Maybe someday even being grandparents.