I cannot believe that it has already been seven months since we started on this journey. I know that a lot has happened since we first made the decision to file our application, but it still feels like it was just yesterday. One of the first things I realized once we had been approved to start the process was that choosing the kids we are going to adopt was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be. In my head, at the beginning at least, God would lead us immediately to the right kids, the organization would tell us exactly who we were getting and it would be fine….now, that thought is incredibly amusing to me. 

One of the many things that I did not understand when we first began the process was that from the very beginning you were supposed to choose between two different paths: the waiting child list and the traditional route. The waiting child list is what I generally think of when I think of adoption. It is a list of kids who have expressed interest in adoption and are simply waiting for someone to pick their file. These kids generally have more developmental delays, medical health concerns, or are part of a sibling group because if they do not have those additional difficulties they are often more quickly matched to a person who chose the traditional route. Of course, there are always more kids that need adopting than there are parents in the traditional route, so it is not always the case. When you take the traditional route, you send your list (it is like 10 pages long) of what ages, genders, and disabilities you are willing to take on with a certain child. Then, the government matches you with a child who fits that criteria. This process can take up to 6 years, especially if you are wanting a baby. Meanwhile, the waiting child list only takes about twelve to eighteen months, so in an effort to bring home our siblings as soon as possible, we chose to go the waiting child route. What I did not anticipate at that time would be how hard it would be to look at all the children’s files. 

Almost every file of a sibling group had a picture attached showing all of the kids together. It was heartbreaking to see them because most of them were smiling so big like it was the best day ever, but with a lot of the older kids you could see pain in their eyes that the smile did not take away. It was an incredibly hard thing for me to not only realize, but also be okay with the fact that we were not going to be able to help them all. What we were trying to find was a group who we could reach, who would adjust the best to our family dynamic, and would thrive more with us than they would with someone else. For some reason that was really hard for me to accept, and I still struggle with it often.

However, in looking at the files, we learned a lot about how they were set up and just mostly what to look for in them. One of the major things that always surprised me in looking at each individual sibling set was that sometimes the information was very old. This happened a lot with the pictures, where the child would be twelve, but the picture was taken when he/she was seven. It always threw me for a loop whenever it came up because it takes a second to realize that, “wait, the kid is way older than he looks!” Another thing that none of us understood at first was the term dissolution. On every file it would specify if that group had had a dissolution before or not. We finally had to ask someone what it meant. Apparently a dissolution occurs when a child or sibling group is adopted, but then the adoption falls apart, and the children are sent back. None of us felt comfortable with bringing on kids who already have troubled backgrounds and then experienced another trauma like that. I felt terrible any time I would look at a file that said yes to the dissolution and then move on because, while I knew that those kids are really hurting and struggling, I did not feel that we would be able to help them nearly as much as they would need after so many traumatic events. Always in our minds was the reminder that we are a military family, and we needed to think about how multiple moves would continue to affect their growth and development. It took a weird combination of a tough skin and a soft heart to be able to continually look at the files and decide what was going to be best for not only our family but any adoptees as well. While it was difficult in so many ways, it has brought about in the last couple of days one of the best things that has ever happened to me. As I was struggling with how to end this post, we got news that the second sibling group we asked if we could adopt said yes, so in the next 6-12 months I am going to have a fifteen year old sister and thirteen year old brother! While I did not originally think that I wanted another brother at the beginning of all of this (one little brother feels like enough most days), now it feels like it is the best thing that possibly could have happened. While it was definitely not as easy or as short as I thought it would be, God did lead us to the right file and is giving me two new siblings!

-Gabriella