ADOPTION: The Funks are adopting!
We have some big news to share with everybody!
Are you ready?
We’re adopting!
That’s right!
So let’s start at the beginning where is the beginning…. oh, goodness, where’s the beginning?
I’m gonna chat about 3 things:
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- Why we want to adopt
- Why we want to adopt now
- What that process will look like for us
Why we want to adopt
Let’s start with why we want to adopt in the first place. Both of us, even before we knew each other – before we started dating or got married, we’ve both had a desire to adopt. If you ask my parents if you ask anybody who knows me well, it’s always been something that I have had a passion for and have desired to do in the future. A desire to add to your family, not from just biological kids but adding through adoption. Taking care of other children and have them in your home, to become part of your family, is something that I’ve always wanted to do. Also, we hope to be able to make a better, lifelong change for a child who, through no fault of their own, lost their family or their family couldn’t provide for them. We hope to provide for a child like that and give them a hope in the future – a safe place to grow up.
This desire for adoption is also something that’s really important to us in our faith. We believe that God adopted us as His children, and likewise, we too are called to provide and adopt other people into like our lives and into our homes – one way to do that is through adoption
Why we want to adopt now
Currently, we don’t have any children of our own and it is something that we do desire and hope one day we will have. However,\ at the same time, we have wanted to have adopted children. Whichever one comes first for us is just as equally exciting. Since we’re of the age where we want to have children and we want to start a family, we know too that the adoption process can take a while. These factors lead us to decide that now is a good time to start the process.
We knew that the adoption could take awhile and we thought: Well, if we know we want to adopt sometime in the future and if it’s going to take a few years maybe to actually finish the adoption, we should just start the process now so that in a few years you know we’re further down the trail and we can keep going with it.
Last fall (2017) we started talking about it more seriously and I, in my usually excited nature, have a way of getting way ahead of Jason. To be fair though, I have been asking Jason if we can go ahead and adopt kids since we got married. Basically, I’ve been fixated on it for quite some time, knowing now is the time for sure that we should move forward. Regardless of my intuition, I had coasted really far down the road of researching all of these agencies and knowing everything about everything about adoption, and Jason had barely done any research. Jason had to tell me to stop and remind me that we need to make this decision TOGETHER.
From that discussion, we decided to read a book about adoption it’s called Adoptive For Life. The book was really helpful for us to learn about adoption and helped us talk through what type of adoption we should pursue. After reading it we decided, “okay, let’s let’s do this!”
Thankfully, we found some fellow expats who both live in Turkey and adopted. Per their agency recommended and our research, we applied to use them. Since we’re living overseas and this agency knows how to work with people overseas, it seems like a great fit so far.
What that process will look like for us
The process of adoption looks different for everyone. While there are lots of reasons people go with domestic or international, we have chosen to go through an international adoption instead of a domestic adoption. From reading the book together and talking about adoption together, we felt that while we are living in Turkey, adopting from a nearby country would be absolutely great and easier for us.
I’ll share a lot more specifics about the adoption as we go along, both via videos first then transcribe it to a post like this one. Right now we’re still pretty early in the process and so there’s a lot of things we just don’t know yet. Some of those being:
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- we don’t know we don’t know how long it’s may take
- we don’t know who the kids are
- how many kids we’re going to adopt (yes, we get to decide!)
We are really excited about the adoption and there are going be ways that y’all can support us through this journey. We asked right now for your support and your encouragement.
As well we hope to encourage other people too who want to adopt – especially those who live overseas. We hope you will consider. Just because you live in another country, doesn’t mean that you can’t adopt.
***Watch a video of our announcement HERE.
Questions for you folks out there! I want to hear from you!
Have you adopted before?
Do you hope to adopt in the future?
Any positive words or tips you have for us as we go through this process?
Note about adoptions in Turkey: Adopting from Turkey is basically impossible for us. That being said, we didn’t even try to adopt from the Turkish system, and we don’t actually know if it’s impossible for us. We’ve heard from many other people who have lived here as expats that adopting from Turkey that is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Some of the rules make it hard for even Turks to adopt. However, it can be possible to have a private foreigner to foreigner adoption through the courts, but it is not easy to come by. It is something we hope to be considered for in the future.
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