First Post

Welcome to our blog.  This is the beginning of our journey to parenthood- we have decided to adopt!  First things first, though, who are we?  We are, according to my husband, "an average american couple, madly in love" (he's so funny).  Really, though, we are Chris and Sarah Adams, we live in the Austin, TX area, we have three adorable dogs, and we have been married for almost three years.  I work in financial services, and we have just started our own business working with forclosed properties.  We have owned our home for a little over a year and "are ready to start using one of our extra three bedrooms" (from the hubbs).  Both of us have always known that at the very least if we couldn't concieve children that we would definitely adopt.  Over the last few years of our relationship, however, we have come to decide we just really want to adopt. 

There are so many children all over the world that are orphaned and we would love to provide at least one of those children with a home and loving family.  After looking at all kinds of websites and other peoples' blogs we decided to adopt our child from Poland.  Both of us have European and Native American heritage, but out of all those countries Poland seems like the best option.  Why Poland?  It just feels right.  Plus, we think that what would work best with our little family of five is a young child under 2 or 3 years old.  We could adopt a child with minor health issues, but nothing huge, and adopting from Poland is one of the more affordable countries we could adopt from (though we are a loooong way away from that $20-something-thousand goal).

Since we have decided on a country, our next step is to find an agency.  We thought about trying to adopt without an agency, but after a ton of research (I am the queen of researching things to death) it looks like we need to just find those extra thousands of dollars to make sure things are smooth and done right.  There is also only one agency in Poland that will adopt children to Americans without an American agency, and that means we have 1/3 the opportunity to find our child.  So far we are narrowing down our agency search to just a couple of agencies that we want to research a little more before making our decision and taking the plunge (and I have made a spread sheet to organize our finds- see how organized we are).  So far our front runner is St. Mary's, but we haven't contacted them or anything yet.

As we have never done this before, we are always looking for any information and advice from anyone with experience in adopting, especially from Poland.  This is just the beginning of a long journey, but we are both so excited, and can't wait to see what happens!