Brian and I never considered adoption or even had one conversation about it until three years ago. (This next sentence is sad but keep reading) In the timespan of one month, I miscarried a precious baby and our three year old daughter had a rare bacteria infection which included neck surgery, ongoing consultations with the infectious disease clinic, and five months of aggressive antibiotics. It was an extremely difficult time for us because on one hand we were grieving over the loss of a miscarriage and on the other hand we were dealing with a potentially life threatening health problem with our daughter. The events reminded us how truly precious the life is that God gives us. It was also during this time that we were in a class at church with a college age student who had been adopted as a young girl. Brian was especially impacted by her story. He realized how different this girl's life would have been without the loving home of a forever family. We had many experiences like this during this time. The infectious disease clinic at Children's Mercy hospital in Kansas City was also coincidentally, the international adoption clinic for the surrounding Midwest states. We were able to come face to face with children who had been impacted by adoption.
Over the last three years, we have seen our hearts change. God has given us a desire to adopt and has certainly changed our hearts in that regard. He placed circumstance after circumstance in our paths and showed us the preciousness of life. We firmly believe that God has different things for different people. For us, this is expanding our family through adoption but we don't believe there is a gold sticker for families who adopt. The most important thing in life is to know Him and be obedient to what He has for us.
So, we took the last three years to get informed about adoption, save our money to finance the adoption and continue praying. We researched domestic, foster adoption and international adoption. For us, in the end, we chose international adoption, but again God has different things for different people and one is not better than the other.
All this is to say that.....we formally started the process a month ago! yayyyy!!
and now we are in the middle of our home study and a mountain of paperwork. (a good mountain of paperwork, but nonetheless, it's still a mountain =) I didn't understand this before, but when you adopt internationally, you do all of the paperwork upfront, you get your home study completed, send all of your certified information to US immigration and then submit it all to China. After china approves you, it may take several months to match with a child and then up to six months to travel. So for us, we are looking at a time frame of approx. 18 months, maybe a hair less. =) That's ok, we will discuss why it will take this amount of time for our adoption in a later post.
We are excited to adopt and looking forward to all the adventures that the next year and a half will hold. =)
** please email us directly at stilesfamily@hotmail.com if you would like to comment. **
