Family to Family Adoptions Inc, Adoptive Families, Birth Mothers

This Sunday, May 13, 2012, most everyone will be celebrating Mother’s Day. Maybe you are a mother yourself or you will be honoring your mother on this very special holiday. What most people don’t realize is that the day before on Saturday, May 12, 2012 there will be birthmothers everywhere that have lovingly placed their children for adoption who will be remembering and honoring their children. Birthmother’s Day is not on our calendars and most people don’t even know that this day exists. It was started by a group of Seattle birthmothers and the first gathering was in 1990. This day has been going on for quite some time yet it is not a day known by many. If you have adopted a child or if you have placed a child or are an adoption professional, you may know about this very special day or you may not. Hopefully this blog post will reach many people and there will be more awareness for Birthmother’s Day this Saturday and in the future.

So as you honor your mother and the women in your life this Sunday, please take some time on Saturday to honor your biological mother and all the other mothers who have sacrificed their own feelings and with an abundance amount of love have allowed so many other women to celebrate Mother’s Day. Honor her on Saturday in some way by sending a note or pictures and if you no longer have contact with your child’s biological mother then honor her by taking out your child’s Lifebook or pictures and talking about her with your child.  I want to take this time to personally thank all of the birthmothers who have placed through our agency for your unselfishness and love that you gave to your child. I know I can speak for our staff and our adoptive families when I sincerely say Thank You! Happy Birthmother’s Day from all of us at Family to Family!

An adoption workshop has been added to our events and schedule page for April 28, 2012 in Arlington, Virginia. If you are interested in adopting or would like to know some more information about the adoption process and our agency and reside in Virginia or the surrounding areas, please join us for this workshop. The workshop will be held at the home of one of our adoptive families. Our Executive Director will be there along with some adoptive families that have completed adoptions through our agency. If you would like to attend, please call our office at 281-342-4042 or email Maxine Seiler at max@fam2fam.org to RSVP and get the location’s address.

We want to thank our hostess and all of the families that will be there for this workshop. We look forward to meeting some new adoptive families. If you are interested in possibly hosting a workshop in your area, please contact us.

The relinquishment process in adoption raises lots of questions for both adoptive families and biological parents.  Alot of confusion from this topic stems from the different kinds of adoptions. One concern we hear frequently from adoptive families is if the biological parent can return months or years after the adoption and reclaim their child.  There is alot of fear on the adoptive parents part and why some families choose to do international adoption instead of a domestic adoption. In the State of Texas, if you adopt through a private licensed child-placing agency such as Family to Family Adoptions, relinquishments are signed by a biological parent no more than 48 hours after the birth of the baby. Once these voluntary relinquishments are signed they are irrovacable. These standards are for the State of Texas and private licensed agencies and vary from state to state. Most people who fear that this might happen have heard from someone else that it happened to their family or they know someone it happened to. It is important to remember and understand that the relinquishment process can be different for the foster care system, if the adoption is done through an attorney, and if the biological parents did not relinquish their parental rights but instead granted custody to a family member or friend.  If you have concerns or questions about the relinquishment process the best person to get the information from is the adoption professional. We will answer any and all questions regarding this process and hope to alleviate any concerns or fears you have regarding relinquishments. Please contact our agency for further clarification or if you have additional questions regarding relinquishments or the adoption process in general.

At this time our internet is not working. It appears as though it will be down starting today and through the weekend. We are told that it will be back up by Tuesday at 8 AM. We apologize that we cannot receive any emails or inquiries from our website at this time. Please contact our office at 281-342-4042 if you need any assistance or have any questions about our programs. Thank you.

On October 8, 2011, our staff and adoptive families gathered together at Dewberry Farm in Brookshire, Texas for our annual adoptive parent picnic. We look forward to the picnic every year. As a social worker at the agency, I have the privilege of working with the adoptive families and getting to know them through the adoption process. Our adoptive families are a part of our “family” at the agency and through the process of adoption a relationship is formed with each of them. As you can imagine we have quite the extended family after 10 years of placements. I get the honor of not only doing the home studies but the post placement visits for the majority of the families in our area. I love going to the picnic and seeing all of the kids and how much they have grown over the year.

 When we gather at the farm, we have the chance to catch up, eat together, have some cake, and watch our children have a great time being kids. There is so much to do there such as pig races, hay rides, zip lines, pony rides, pumpkin patch, and more. I know my two girls are exhausted when we leave from all the fun. So if you did not make it this year, we missed you. If you were there, thank you from all of us at Family to Family and please send us pictures of your fun-filled family day. We look forward to seeing every one next year.

Our 2011-2012 Family to Family Calendar made its debut at our picnic last weekend. Every year we put together a calendar that includes pictures of our babies and families that we have placed through our agency. We invite the adoptive families to send us pictures of their child or children to be put in our calendar and we also give the family the option to add their child’s birthday. The annual calendar is our favorite project and it is our best fundraiser. Please consider purchasing a calendar to support Family to Family. If you would like to buy one of our calendars, please contact the agency or Debbie at deb@fam2fam.org. Thank you for your continued support of our agency and mission.

Our History and Adoption Statistics Page has been updated with our most recent number of placements and average wait and placement times for active adoptive families. Since our inception, we have placed 293 babies and toddlers and had the pleasure of working with so many wonderful birthmothers and adoptive families. We continue to place children because of the love that both birthmothers and adoptive parents have for a child.

If you would like more information about Family to Family and the adoption process, please feel free to contact us. A list of dates for our conferences can be found on our Events and Schedules page. We also offer private consults in our office just give us a call to schedule one. We look forward to many more adoptive placements and to working with you to help you create your family.

Did you know that before we started our domestic adoption program, Family to Family Adoptions did international adoptions from countries such as Guatemala and Russia?  Even though we no longer provide placement services for international adoption, our agency still provides international home studies. Family to Family is a home study provider for agencies who place international children including All God’s Children International, European Adoption Consultants, and Wide Horizons for Children to name a few.  Agencies such as these help adoptive families with their paperwork and the referral and adoption of a child from various countries.  Our agency helps the adoptive family with the home study process required to adopt a child. We have completed home studies for Ethiopia, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and many others countries.

The home study process for an international adoption is similar to the domestic process but varies from country to country. Family to Family follows the guidelines provided by the international agency and provides a thorough home study report meeting all of the required standards of the placing agency and the desired country. As part of your home study process, Family to Family will also provide post placement visits and counseling for adoptive families if the country they adopt from requires this or if needed.  

If you reside in the Houston or surrounding areas and are in need of an international home study, contact your placing agency and ask if Family to Family is an approved home study provider for the country and the agency you have chosen. Then contact us and we will provide you with all of the information to get you started on your home study process. We hope to hear from you soon and look forward to helping you complete your family through adoption.

Anyone can tell by looking at our family that Jonah is adopted and I believe that makes it easy for interested people to ask me questions about how we came to be a family.   I have made new friends and reconnected with friends with whom I’ve been long out of contact through my willingness to discuss Jonah’s adoption.  It’s such a joyful fact of my life that I’m thrilled for the opportunity to talk about it.  Little did I know before Jonah was born, many women around me are going through infertility issues or are interested in growing their families through adoption for one reason or another.  The process seems mysterious and intimidating to someone who hasn’t gone through it before and I’m so happy to encourage would-be parents to learn more about the process.  Our lives are vastly richer because we are Jonah’s parents and I am more than happy to help other families find their riches too. 

Every conversation I’ve had with women interested in adoption has been different because everyone’s circumstances are different.  However, there has been some overlap on some basic themes – I’ll go through some of them below:

How old was Jonah when you adopted him?

Jonah has been our baby since his very first breath.  His birth-mom allowed me to be in the operating room holding her hand when he was delivered via C-section.  The nurse took him out of the womb, wrapped him in a towel, and placed him in my arms.  He left the hospital with us when he and his birth-mom were discharged three days later and he has always been ours.  We finalized the adoption when he was seven months old.

Was there a lot of paperwork?

You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork:   forms, questionnaires, medical records, financial records, diagrams of your home, fingerprints for background checks, life history, family tree…there is no aspect of your life that will remain private if you choose to go through an adoption home study.   The sheer volume of paperwork can be overwhelming and it took us a long time to work up the nerve to get started.  The only way to do it, though, is to just start filling it out, one page at a time. 

I would do it all over again in an instant and I believe that the next time (if there is a next time) it won’t take us as long to complete the paperwork just because we won’t be intimidated by it.

Did the process take a long time?

It felt like an eternity because of how badly we wanted a baby and because we’d already been dealing with infertility for over two years, plus another five months of infertility treatments.  And it took us a long time to get our home study started because, like I said above, the amount of paperwork scared us.

However, once we got started in real time, it took us about a month to complete the home study and about fifteen months later, we had Jonah.  The key for us was finding the right adoption agency:  we started with one adoption agency that didn’t care for very many birth-moms each year and we never got a match with that agency.  Once we signed on with Family to Family, it had been only five months when Jonah’s birth-mom contacted us and Jonah was born just three months after that.

How did you get started?  Did you work with an agency?

The first thing that you have to do is to complete an adoption home study.  We contacted an agency local to us that provides home studies, but that does not actually place children with families.  A licensed social worker conducted the home study, interviewed my husband and me together and then separately, and interviewed some of our friends to complete the picture.  She also guided us through options available to us and helped us determine what was right for us in the process.  She is the person who helped us find both of the child placement agencies with which we worked.

 Do you keep in touch with his birth-mom?

Jonah’s birth-mom told us before Jonah was even born that she would not want photos or updates from us.  She has three children older than Jonah and placing him for adoption was the only way that she could see to be able to care for those kids.  It was a very painful decision for her but one that she never backed away from.  She told me that it would be too difficult for her to see and hear about Jonah and that she felt that she needed to look to the future with her kids.  She told me that she might be open to meeting him one day, many years from now.

I promised her that we will regularly send letters and photos to the agency and that if she ever changes her mind, she can check in there.  As far as I know, she has not done so.  I would love to hear from her and I want her to know how wonderful, amazing, brilliant, and handsome our boy is.  Hopefully she’ll be able to contact us some day.

Every adoptive family’s story is different and there’s even much more to our story than I’ve written here.  The topics above are what have come up most in my conversations with other people exploring adoption, though there are other issues too.   If you have any questions about our experiences, just email me (finkelstein.kate@gmail.com ) – I’ll be happy to talk with you.

Written by Kate Finkelstein, adoptive mother

We adopted our oldest son, Jonah, just over three years ago at his birth.  When Jonah was eighteen months old, my husband Harris and I were just a couple of months away from beginning the home study to adopt our second child when we were astounded to learn that I was pregnant.   Jonah watched as my belly grew, he felt the baby moving around in my tummy, and he understood that his little brother was in there.  Our second child was born when Jonah was twenty-seven months old.

Just before he turned three, he asked me, “Mama, where do I come from?”  So I told him, not for the first time, that he was born in Texas, just like me.  He was quiet for a minute and then he said, “But Mama, who was there?”  We’ve talked about adoption a lot and we’ve read many kids’ books about adoption, so he knows the general idea, but this was the first time that he expressed an understanding that he’s adopted.   Here’s what I told him:

You remember that before you were born, Daddy and I didn’t have a baby and I was so sad because I really, really wanted a baby to love.  You know that I cried every day because I needed a baby so bad.  Well, there was a lady in Texas who had a baby growing in her tummy – that baby was you.  One day that lady called me and said, “I understand that you want to be a mommy.  I have a baby growing in my tummy and I want you to be his mommy.  But you have to promise to love him and take good care of him.”  So I promised her that Daddy and I would love you and take good care of you and that I would be your mommy and that Daddy would be your daddy.  So Daddy and I went to Texas and we talked to the lady and the next day, we all went to the hospital and you were born.

That seemed to satisfy him for a while.  Then yesterday in the car, he brought it up again.  This time, he started with, “Mama, how do they make cows?”  I clarified, “Do you mean, ‘where do baby cows come from?’  Baby cows grow inside the mama cows’ tummies, just like people do.”  Jonah said, also not for the first time, “I growed in your tummy!”   I gently told him, “No, remember, you grew in another lady’s tummy and then I got to be your mommy.”  Because Jonah’s birth mother is so wonderful, I also was able to tell him that when he was in J.’s tummy, I saw him moving around and I felt him kicking and pushing on her just like he saw and felt his little brother pushing on me from the inside.

Without batting an eye, my little boy said, “And when I was in your tummy, I hugged you.”

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I’m learning that for a three year-old, the line between reality and magic is very fine– the world is like a fairy tale.  In my son’s three year-old mind and heart, he knows that he grew in someone else’s tummy, but he also knows that he was hugging me before he was born.  I plan to make sure that he always knows both of those things.

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Talking to children about adoption adds to their understanding of the world, whether they are adopted or not. This kind of conversation can be a great gift to your child. Even a simple outline of the adoption process can open their eyes to new thoughts about relationships in their lives.