Do you have kids? Do you remember the excitement and thrill you experienced during your first pregnancy? The planning, the panic, the ultrasounds, and the morning sickness. Well, my wife and I are currently expecting our first child, but we’re skipping all of that… because we’re adopting!
In 2022, my wife and I decided that having natural-born children wasn’t in the cards for us. After considering our options (I still occasionally bring up the idea of being one of those couples who has no kids, travels the world, and lives like royalty with all our extra money), we chose to adopt. From there, we began a journey to learn the many highs and lows of the adoption process: the big expense, home inspections, fingerprint checks, and the mental fatigue of waiting for years to be selected.
Our journey has us searching for a child from the United States through an agency based out of California, though our child could come from anywhere within the country. I know what you’re thinking… not really “buying Canadian”, but give us a break, it was the best choice for us (I wonder what tariffs apply when importing babies?) For us, the Canadian adoption process brought a lot of personal challenges that just didn’t work (I’ll delve into this more in a future article), and most other countries required us to be away from work for an extended period which with my business and my wife’s optometry practice just wasn’t feasible. We learned early on there are a lot of very different ways to adopt, and each family’s circumstances will be different so we were very glad when a friend put us in touch with the agency we eventually chose.
And so, while we continue to wait, I thought it’d be fun to share the weird, wonderful world of adoption and all the things we’ve come to know thus far. If you are an adopt-o-parent yourself, you’ll probably relate to some of these stories, or maybe your experience was totally different which is cool too. And if you haven’t adopted a child (which I assume is most of you), my hope is you’ll learn something about the process and have a good chuckle while reading this very lighthearted column.