The journey is beginning or continuing depending on how you look at it

I am starting this blog to keep a record of our process and because I really enjoy reading everyone elses blog as they go along on their journeys through the adoption process.

Our story: David and I have been married since 2001. Our first son was born in 2003 and our 2nd son was born in 2005. Then we had our first loss in 2007, it was a girl at 20 weeks. It hit me hard and the loss made me "go after" a healthy baby quite fervently. I lost another baby in July of 2008. We were now going about the 3rd child in 2 different directions. We went through the process of becoming foster parents. It wook several months and we took 27 hours of training. We never got a child placed with us, because we live in an area with a lot of foster homes and they only place children within a small radius of their birth home. (Even though there is a shortage in the low-income areas) I tried one more time and we got our 3rd son, who was born in July 2009. The theory we are going with is that there was something wrong with the "girl" gene and that is why this boy was perfectly healthy.

So, we told a number of people that we wanted to adopt and in June 2009 we found a birthmother who wanted to give up her daughter. We had her for 5 days from the hospital, but then the birthmother changed her mind. To us, it was worse than the 2 miscarriages.

So, international adoption seemed like a good choice, mostly because you can select the gender of the child you want to adopt. With 3 boys, we wanted to be sure our 4th child will be a girl.

We decided on Poland, mostly because it didn't seem as common as Russia or China. We found an agency in June 2009. Our next challenge was finding a homestudy agency in our area. It was a challenge because we have a newborn and some agencies will not let you adopt with a baby under 1 year in your home. We found one and now we are gathering documents and going through the homestudy process.