Welcome!

Welcome to our blog and our first official blog post! Many of you reading this have seen our Facebook page and know a little about what we are doing here. Still, it seems it may need some explaining. Here we are, putting our whole story out there for anyone to read on the Internet. If it seems a little odd at first, that's alright; it felt odd to us as well when we first heard about the many avenues of adoption outreach. But when we decided to open up and share our story through outreach, Suzy's eyes immediately lit up. I think they lit up because she is very open about everything we've been through, as sharing with others is highly cathartic for her. They lit up because it was something she could create, and most of all, something she could control.

Dealing with infertility issues is extraordinarily taxing. At times, it feels like you have no control over your own body. As you learn that many things you may have taken for granted do not necessarily come as easily as expected, it is easy to feel like your life has been turned upside-down. It was very difficult for Suzy to go through all of these issues and realize that she wasn't really in full control of her own body. But as we arrived at our decision to pursue adoption, her body began to feel more at ease and the stress seemed to melt away. We were relieved to not have to devote our lives to treatments any longer and felt as though we could gain some sense of control.

Of course, in the long run, we have little control over the adoption process. But what we can do is share our story. It may seem that we are promoting ourselves, even advertising. Hopefully you don't feel that way, and our sharing is not making you uncomfortable. Obviously, that's not our intent; we are doing this to get our story out there. We are doing so because we hope that it will lead us to our future child. The truth is that the majority of adoptions through our agency actually happen in this very way, through personal networking connections made outside of the agency. Thus, we believe that pursuing outreach through Facebook, this blog, our future website, and beyond will help us connect with the birth mother of our future child.

It took us a long time to become comfortable with sharing our story online. We were even nervous about how our Facebook page would be received. Suzy is connected with many people on Facebook that we don't necessarily interact with on a regular basis, many of whom were unaware of our plans to adopt. What would they think? How would they react? Fortunately, we can say that the reaction has been incredible. We launched our Facebook site about a week ago, and in that time, 80 people have liked our site. We watched as friends near and far, new and old liked the site and sent their heart-felt support in thoughtful notes. It was so moving to hear people we haven't seen in years show their support. It was incredible. Thanks to insights provided by Facebook, we know that we have reached 1,371 people ("reached" being the number of individual people who have viewed some sort of content from our site). This has all happened because of the likes and comments that are shared by our those who have liked the page within each user's own network. We can hardly believe that we have reached that many in only one week. And how many could we reach with these 80 likes alone? 23,775. Yes, Facebook tells us that the total number of friends of all those who have liked our site is 23,775. Unbelievable.

So we're here to say thank you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your understanding. And welcome to our adoption blog. Suzy is working tirelessly on our adoption website, which will give much more insight into our family. But this blog is here to chronicle our journey, to tell our story, to discuss open adoption and to share our dreams for our future family. We hope that you enjoy sharing this journey with us, and most of all, we hope that putting ourselves out there in this way will somehow help a young mother as they discover that they have the power of exploring their options.