The beginning of our journey.....

My husband and I planned on having 2 kids. We never considered that one of them would be adopted. We have a biological daughter who is almost 2 years old. We became pregnant with our second child and at the 20 week routine ultrasound, we discovered that our baby boy had severe skeletal dysplasia and that he would be guaranteed to die very shortly after birth. All of his long bones were extremely short and his lungs would not have room to breathe. We were assured that our baby would not live more than a few hours.
We were stunned and so, so very sad. We read all we could about his condition and we knew that we did not want our baby to suffer, so we decided to terminate the pregnancy. During the termination, my uterus was perforated, I lost more than 2 liters of blood and had to have an emergency hysterectomy.
We had already decided that we wanted another child, we just had to figure out how to do this. We started talking about adoption almost right away. We also looked into surrogacy, but it is extremely expensive. So, we started reading about adoption, both domestic and international. We read many blogs and informational sites. A friend of a friend referred us to a local agency. We set up a meeting with the local agency and we found out that the countries we qualify for are India, Russia and Ethiopia. The agent told us that an Indian baby would be between 2 and 3 years old and have special needs. We decided that we wanted a healthy baby, so that now narrowed our options to Ethiopia, Russia or domestic. A Russian adoption is significantly more expensive than an Ethiopian adoption. With a domestic adoption, we would be waiting for a birth parent to choose us out of a book and that process could take years. We were not interested in the heartbreak of foster care. So, all roads led us to Ethiopia.
So, we applied to both the local and international agency. We were accepted into the Ethiopian program and we are starting our home study now!