Adopting Three Year Olds + Thanksgiving Pictures

November is, or I guess I should say was, National Adoption Month—a month set aside each year to raise awareness about adoption. On November 1st I started thinking about what I would want people to know about adoption. What haven’t I already said by sharing our story on this blog? The answer came easily and it is only because this has been a busy month that I’ve waited until the last day of the month to write about it.

To tell this story I must go back two and a half years, to the time when we started to get serious about adopting. This is the time when adoptive parents mull through a myriad of big decisions, for unlike growing a family through the birth of a biological child, in adoption you must choose things like age, race, nationality, gender, and openness to special needs. Making such decisions felt unnatural and uncomfortable to me. Perhaps it is my Catholic upbringing that instilled a belief that these are God’s decisions, not mine, so choosing things like gender and special needs was tough for me.

At first I thought age was going to be the easy decision. I had never been a mother and wanted the experience of mothering a baby, and it seemed sensible to begin parenting with a child who was not yet walking or talking. I was also afraid of the risks of long term emotional, physical or bonding challenges more commonly associated with older child adoption. The availability of healthy infants was one of the things that first drew us to Ethiopia.

As I continued researching and learning about adoption, I found myself experiencing deep emotion whenever I came across a story of an older toddler adoption. I used to watch this show on the Discovery Health Channel called Adoption Stories and I would find myself dry eyed during stories about infants but sobbing through episodes about three year olds. There weren’t many blogs back then, or at least I didn’t know of many, of families who had adopted children that age from Ethiopia (there are lots of them now), but I came across this one early on and it instantly became a favorite. Actually, I will confess, I never really read their blog. I just watched that video montage of them meeting their children over and over again. It kills me every time!

I started to realize that I was drawn to adopting an older child, and Mark was too, but I was scared. What did I know about parenting a three year old from a hard background? What if we had trouble bonding? What if the child had RAD? The first chapter alone in the book Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft was enough to keep me up at night. Still, I couldn’t ignore my feelings, so we had our home study approve us to adopt two children ages 0-5 years old, and went on the wait list with our agency to adopt siblings ages 0-14 and 0-36 months old. "Let God decide if I'm ready for this," I thought...

As I wrote in my last post (and last year if you were reading that long ago! Thanks for still reading if that’s you!) ultimately our agency asked us if we wanted to increase our age range in order to adopt our boys. Having our home study written to approve us for a wide age range allowed them to do this. Initially we thought the children were 14 months old, but it turned out they were 28 months at referral and just two months shy of three by the time we were able to bring them home. Obviously we said yes, and I thank God every day for finding me worthy.

Allowing myself to be open to adopting three year olds was the most complicated, difficult and BEST decision I ever made. There are unique challenges to adopting older children, but there are also joys that I do not have the words to describe. All of it, the hard and the wonderful, have enriched my life beyond expectation. That is the awareness I want to shout from the rooftops. Adopting an infant is not the only path to a happy ending and if you feel an inkling in your heart to adopt an older child, I encourage you to listen to it.

OK, enough of that. I know most of you come here for the cute pictures so here are a few more from our VERY thankful Thanksgiving!


FOOTBAAAAAL!



Not so sure about this Santa guy...

Christmas Angel

No words needed...