...if you know someone who is putting up a baby for adoption

[cahn]

We closed. We have started to move in... did a very little bit of clothes and fragile items. And after five calls to the phone company dealing with five different incompetent people, I finally got a competent person who settled everything ("Yeah, uh, I hate to tell you this, but this order is a mess in about five different ways..." "This explains a LOT.") Tomorrow my friends L. and S. are spearheading a massive moving effort. L. is probably my best friend in this city, and is totally made of awesome, and her husband S., though I don't know him as well, is pretty much basically as awesome.

And that brings me to the point of this post: L. and S. would really like to adopt a baby. I am totally and completely sure they will be excellent parents. L. is a lawyer, and S. is an engineer who just got his Ph.D. and started working for a startup. L., in addition, plays the violin and is from an exceedingly musical family, and their baby no doubt would have lots of neat musical opportunities. And she can be sarcastic (though not mean), which is why I like her so much :) I would have no hesitation giving my own kid to them (well, if I had to... but as it is I am hoping L. and S. will feel like babysitting!) ... so... if you know anyone who is interested... I can totally send you their profile.

One thing: They are Mormon, and working through adoption services run by the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. The bio-mother doesn't need to be Mormon, but she does have to be okay with working with them (and having her baby go to Mormons). Doesn't need to be in-state, but I believe needs to be in-country (USA).

Anyway, I hope it works out for them.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

We did it over 40 years ago - at that time there were many hard-to-adopt children. Some for physical reasons, others simply because the parents were not of the same ethnicity. We chose the latter; our child had been in foster care for a year. (The foster parents, superb people, then took in another who was with them for nearly two years before being adopted.) One advantage was that we never had to decide whether or when to speak of adoption - it was always simply a not-very-relevant fact. It was relevant - changing parents at the age of one year is traumatic.

Your friends might not be willing to consider these options - it is hard enough contemplating a child without adding on extra problems (and we took the easier-for-us path, despite having been through the process the standard way twice and thus somewhat experienced) - but if there are still hard-to-adopt children out there who are hard to adopt for reasons that your friends can deal with, it means a lot to those children.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

That's really awesome. Thanks for sharing your experience. We have two mutual friends who have recently adopted from foster care, which I think is wonderful - did you have any problems with the birth parents? I ask because for both of these adoptive sets of parents we know, it has been a long-drawn-out process because of issues with the birth mom (though the birth moms were clearly unfit, and eventually the courts decided in favor of the adoptive parents in both cases), and I think L. and S. were a bit scared away from foster care adoption by that. I think they may be okay with a different ethnicity, though... I should ask about that.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

The child had been put up for adoption at birth and went into foster care. We never knew much about the birth parents. I expect they learned less about us, since it was a year later that we came along. The foster parents were wonderful - they came back to visit and kept in touch with our daughter. [And I gave our daughter a link to this page. :-) ] So I have no experience to share about birth parent relations.