Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Adoption Awareness Month

I just discovered that November is adoption awareness month. And as such those in the adoption community are challenged to write in their blog every day. Well, as it is already the 9th and it is my first time I've obviously fallen a little short but I thought I should at least write once. And I do have a lot to write about...

This last weekend we went to an adoption conference. We don't need anymore adoption credit hours but it's always so good to meet other people looking to adopt, learn something new, and support adoption in general.

I learned about new ways to network to find a baby, being an adoption advocate, and I got a new perspective about open adoption. Ryan and I spoke at the conference about our experience with open adoption and for the first time I felt I ran into some valid concerns as to why you might not feel confortable with it. If you do have an open adoption with one of your children how can you be fair to another child who's birth family has no interest in contact. One child will get presents and cards from a doting birth family while the other will feel that for some reason he or she is less worth being loved. There is a solution. If the birth family is involved with one of the children they have to be involved with all of them. You need to be fair. If you send a gift to one child they need to send a gift to all of them. I always felt instinctively that our birth family would feel that way and they told us as much with our last "almost adoption". They had every intention of "adopting" our would've been son as their grandson or nephew. I think that if you have that open relationship and as you grow together, it will all occur very naturally. As we adopted Ezra his birth grandparents, Kolene and Scott adopted us and they would've adopted any other family we had.