What about adoption?

One of the first questions I was asked after telling people about the positive pregnancy test was about adoption: what about adoption? will you give up adoption then? Will you still adopt? You should change your twitter profile: it still says “trying to adopt”.

My husband and I discussed this immediately, especially since we had an adoption meeting while waiting for the results of our fist beta. We both agreed that we would still like to adopt, despite the added complications of having a biological child.

But, despite this sort of I-want-it-all type of wish, we may not be able to adopt. If all goes well with the pregnancy, we will let the adoption people know about the baby and we’ll be taken out of the (7-year) waiting list for national adoption. Legally, we would still be able to adopt from abroad. However, you may recall that we have applied to several agencies but that none of them retained our profile. We have a permission to adopt a young baby (3 year old maximum) but this is not feasible given the situation of international adoption at the moment. We have already been told that we need to ask for an extension so as to be able to adopt an older child or a child with health problems. To do this we would be asked to go through a another series of meetings with the adoption services, in order to discuss what is basically our new adoption project. There is no way that we could do this in the coming months: it would feel wrong and I am pretty sure that the lady from the adoption services would tell us that we need to focus on a project at a time, which makes perfect sense.

So, to answer the question on whether we’ll still try to adopt, I think the adoption project we had in the last years won’t be possible anymore. If we get approval for it though, we would love to transform our adoption project into a new one in the future.

But for now, after all this time of dreaming of having a baby, I think we owe it to ourselves and to this baby to just take one thing at a time, enjoy the present and simply live our dream.