Cody's Story, our angel.....
Our journey into adoption began with us thinking that we would adopt
children through the Santa Clara County Social Services System. In order to adopt in this county, you have to go through what is called a FostAdopt program. children that are adopted through the county begin as Foster children and when it becomes clear that they will not be reunified with their parents, they are placed into the county pool for adoption.
Having heard many horror stories about adopting through Social Services, we decided to go through a private Christian Agency to become licensed asFoster Parents. Our experience with this has been very good, for the most part.
We started the process in July of 2000. I was very ready to become a mom, so I had all of the paperwork filled out by the time we had our first class. We did all of the background checks, fingerprinting, child abuse indexes, gave them our driving and financial records, etc. In early September we completed all of our training, had all of our background investigation stuff back, we were ready to rock...sort of.
We got a call from Advent (our Foster Agency) explaining to us that we needed to get into the county's classes for adoptive parents soon because the laws were changing and any kids that they placed with us we may not be able to adopt if we weren't done with that class. Ok. so we filled out more paperwork and enrolled in more parenting classes...and off we went. Fast forward to October 27, 2000 we received a call that was a miracle.
Advent had a three day old baby boy who was Fost to Adopt, "could we pickhim up October 28 at 2 pm?" Could we? I grinned from ear to ear, I had heard so many stories about how hard it was to get infants and not to get my hopes up, that I hadn't, but here we were being presented with what was by all rights a miracle. The next 22 hours were a whirlwind of shopping, buying formula, setting everything up, and I couldn't stop grinning.
Saturday dawned and though it was gray and cloudy, the sun was shining here in our hearts. We drove to the hospital to get him, took his diaper bag, got to change him into his going home outfit, at last! I was a Mommy! Cody was our little miracle. He was so comfortable with us, he hardly everfussed, he was a joy to take care of. He stole our hearts with his little cooing noises and the way he just loved to be held. It was so perfect, too perfect in fact.
October 31 dawned, it was our anniversary and it was perfect, we had each other and Cody, all was right with the world. We went to Babies R Us and registered, we took Cody to his first pediatrician appointment , we were n heaven...and at 5 o'clock, our world came crashing down around our ears.
The social worker called and said that there had been a mistake, Cody was never Fost to Adopt, he was only supposed to be placed short term and we had to have him back to his mother by 8 pm. We were and still are devastated.
It is hard to believe how much one 7 pound human being can change your live and your heart. Being his mom and dad was the most joyous thing we had ever felt. It is as if our hearts have big holes in them where he should be. Our home also has a hole where children should be.
Cody, quite simply, taught us how to love.
And so we begin our journey into private adoption in the hopes that the next baby will be ours to keep. In the hopes of helping to fill our hearts and home. In the hopes that some social worker won't be able to just come along and devastate our lives. While we know that all adoption comes with risks, we just hope that this route will have less risks than the previous one.
Cody, wherever you are, we love you and are praying for you.
Mommy and Daddy
MJ's Story......
We moved to FL from the SF Bay Area in CA in March 2004.
We are the parents of a very special little girl. We adopted her at birth Feb. 6, 2001 (adoption was final 11/16/01). She has many special needs due to in utero exposure to way too much junk.
Marjorie has a g-tube now, but for the first 16 months of her life we used donated breastmilk for her (I tried to induce lactation, but I never could get any milk and she couldn't suck, so we had to resort to donated milk. I believe that the breastmilk is one big reason why she is doing so much better than the Dr's expected) We've always done some variation of co-sleeping, she has always been cloth diapered, we plan on homeschooling, I have always been home with her and for 2 years my husband was able to work at home and be with us too.
We moved into Brevard County because dh's parents lived here, then we belatedly learned it has terrible services for our sweet girl and DH's parents really aren't all that interested in being around us.... sigh. DH works the swing shift M-F 2 pm to 1 am sp he is available to take us to Dr's visits, therapy, etc...
I also am disabled due to Fibromyalgia, severe arthritis, migraines, TMJ and Sjogrens Syndrome. I was diagnosed a year after we got MJ. So it is a double whammy for us. It is a good thing that I had already decided to stay home and parent and homeschool Marjorie, because I would have had to do it anyway. I wasn't disabled when we adopted MJ, actually I became disabled as a result of adopting her.....long sotry, ask if you are interested...the upshot is, while we inteded to ahve a disabled baby, we didn't inted to have a disabled mommy....
Here is a bit about our little girl and her issues... it is a bit long and talks a lot about medical stuff (fair warning! LOL).
Our daughter was adopted at birth in Feb. 2001. She was born to a birthmother with about 12 different risk factors, among them were alcoholism, prescription and street drug addiction (the scripts were ativan, dilantin and trazadone, particularly bad), advanced maternal age, poor health, chain smoking, homelessness, no prenatal until we entered the picture at the beginning of her third trimester, she was developmentally delayed and borderline gestational diabetes (as if the rest of it wasn't enough! LOL) MJ was a 36 weeker.
Marjorie (the "baby" she'll always be my baby even tho she is a toddler now) has severe CNS delays, some dysmorphology and had retarded growth for her first 14 months (until we had a g-tube put in, a fundoplication done [a surgery to wrap part of her tummy around her esophogus] and figured out that she was allergic to corn.). She has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Triplegic cerebral palsy (affecting mostly the left side), dyspraxia, Hyposensitive Sensory Integration Disorder (the more rare of the 2 types), she eats zero food by mouth, talks very little (apraxia) but does do some minimal adaptive American Sign Language, Global Dysphagia, she also has a very high probability of becoming Schizophrenic when she is older [both of her birthparents have genetic Schizophrenia] and now this seizure thing...whatever that is.
We consider ourselves very lucky, although she does have quite a few issues, she is so much better off than we were told to hope for. She is a complete joy to be with and like almost all special needs kids has the greatest spirit even through all of her therapies, hospitalizations, etc. She will most likely never be able to leave home.
I didn't want to try to adopt again after losing Cody....Andrew talked me into it. We both knew we wouldn't put any restrictions on the type of child we would adopt (other than they not be terminally ill) We saw the attorney to talk about adopting on Nov. 16, the birthmother was 6 months pregnant and had just been discovered, we don't know exactly what transpired before they found her....The attorney had been looking for a home for MJ for a while and couldn't find one, he was scheduled to go tell the birthmother on the 17th that he couldn't find a home for her baby and htat she would haveto go into Foster Care....60 families said no to her (boy did they miss out) We found out the day before Thanksgiving that wewere going to be able to adopt her....what a miracle.
I truly can't imagine my life without her, every step is a mile with her, although I have to say it is harder than I ever could have imagined. We had hoped to adopt more kids, but that is looking impossible now....With both of us Disabled and only Andrew to take care of us, life is tough, we have had to give up a lot, I am glad that we didn't have her younger, we couldn't have done it, of that I am confident.
Please feel free to ask any question at all, I am not shy about tlaking about her, me or our disabilities, especially if it helps people to understand.....
Our journey into adoption began with us thinking that we would adopt
children through the Santa Clara County Social Services System. In order to adopt in this county, you have to go through what is called a FostAdopt program. children that are adopted through the county begin as Foster children and when it becomes clear that they will not be reunified with their parents, they are placed into the county pool for adoption.
Having heard many horror stories about adopting through Social Services, we decided to go through a private Christian Agency to become licensed asFoster Parents. Our experience with this has been very good, for the most part.
We started the process in July of 2000. I was very ready to become a mom, so I had all of the paperwork filled out by the time we had our first class. We did all of the background checks, fingerprinting, child abuse indexes, gave them our driving and financial records, etc. In early September we completed all of our training, had all of our background investigation stuff back, we were ready to rock...sort of.
We got a call from Advent (our Foster Agency) explaining to us that we needed to get into the county's classes for adoptive parents soon because the laws were changing and any kids that they placed with us we may not be able to adopt if we weren't done with that class. Ok. so we filled out more paperwork and enrolled in more parenting classes...and off we went. Fast forward to October 27, 2000 we received a call that was a miracle.
Advent had a three day old baby boy who was Fost to Adopt, "could we pickhim up October 28 at 2 pm?" Could we? I grinned from ear to ear, I had heard so many stories about how hard it was to get infants and not to get my hopes up, that I hadn't, but here we were being presented with what was by all rights a miracle. The next 22 hours were a whirlwind of shopping, buying formula, setting everything up, and I couldn't stop grinning.
Saturday dawned and though it was gray and cloudy, the sun was shining here in our hearts. We drove to the hospital to get him, took his diaper bag, got to change him into his going home outfit, at last! I was a Mommy! Cody was our little miracle. He was so comfortable with us, he hardly everfussed, he was a joy to take care of. He stole our hearts with his little cooing noises and the way he just loved to be held. It was so perfect, too perfect in fact.
October 31 dawned, it was our anniversary and it was perfect, we had each other and Cody, all was right with the world. We went to Babies R Us and registered, we took Cody to his first pediatrician appointment , we were n heaven...and at 5 o'clock, our world came crashing down around our ears.
The social worker called and said that there had been a mistake, Cody was never Fost to Adopt, he was only supposed to be placed short term and we had to have him back to his mother by 8 pm. We were and still are devastated.
It is hard to believe how much one 7 pound human being can change your live and your heart. Being his mom and dad was the most joyous thing we had ever felt. It is as if our hearts have big holes in them where he should be. Our home also has a hole where children should be.
Cody, quite simply, taught us how to love.
And so we begin our journey into private adoption in the hopes that the next baby will be ours to keep. In the hopes of helping to fill our hearts and home. In the hopes that some social worker won't be able to just come along and devastate our lives. While we know that all adoption comes with risks, we just hope that this route will have less risks than the previous one.
Cody, wherever you are, we love you and are praying for you.
Mommy and Daddy
MJ's Story......
We moved to FL from the SF Bay Area in CA in March 2004.
We are the parents of a very special little girl. We adopted her at birth Feb. 6, 2001 (adoption was final 11/16/01). She has many special needs due to in utero exposure to way too much junk.
Marjorie has a g-tube now, but for the first 16 months of her life we used donated breastmilk for her (I tried to induce lactation, but I never could get any milk and she couldn't suck, so we had to resort to donated milk. I believe that the breastmilk is one big reason why she is doing so much better than the Dr's expected) We've always done some variation of co-sleeping, she has always been cloth diapered, we plan on homeschooling, I have always been home with her and for 2 years my husband was able to work at home and be with us too.
We moved into Brevard County because dh's parents lived here, then we belatedly learned it has terrible services for our sweet girl and DH's parents really aren't all that interested in being around us.... sigh. DH works the swing shift M-F 2 pm to 1 am sp he is available to take us to Dr's visits, therapy, etc...
I also am disabled due to Fibromyalgia, severe arthritis, migraines, TMJ and Sjogrens Syndrome. I was diagnosed a year after we got MJ. So it is a double whammy for us. It is a good thing that I had already decided to stay home and parent and homeschool Marjorie, because I would have had to do it anyway. I wasn't disabled when we adopted MJ, actually I became disabled as a result of adopting her.....long sotry, ask if you are interested...the upshot is, while we inteded to ahve a disabled baby, we didn't inted to have a disabled mommy....
Here is a bit about our little girl and her issues... it is a bit long and talks a lot about medical stuff (fair warning! LOL).
Our daughter was adopted at birth in Feb. 2001. She was born to a birthmother with about 12 different risk factors, among them were alcoholism, prescription and street drug addiction (the scripts were ativan, dilantin and trazadone, particularly bad), advanced maternal age, poor health, chain smoking, homelessness, no prenatal until we entered the picture at the beginning of her third trimester, she was developmentally delayed and borderline gestational diabetes (as if the rest of it wasn't enough! LOL) MJ was a 36 weeker.
Marjorie (the "baby" she'll always be my baby even tho she is a toddler now) has severe CNS delays, some dysmorphology and had retarded growth for her first 14 months (until we had a g-tube put in, a fundoplication done [a surgery to wrap part of her tummy around her esophogus] and figured out that she was allergic to corn.). She has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Triplegic cerebral palsy (affecting mostly the left side), dyspraxia, Hyposensitive Sensory Integration Disorder (the more rare of the 2 types), she eats zero food by mouth, talks very little (apraxia) but does do some minimal adaptive American Sign Language, Global Dysphagia, she also has a very high probability of becoming Schizophrenic when she is older [both of her birthparents have genetic Schizophrenia] and now this seizure thing...whatever that is.
We consider ourselves very lucky, although she does have quite a few issues, she is so much better off than we were told to hope for. She is a complete joy to be with and like almost all special needs kids has the greatest spirit even through all of her therapies, hospitalizations, etc. She will most likely never be able to leave home.
I didn't want to try to adopt again after losing Cody....Andrew talked me into it. We both knew we wouldn't put any restrictions on the type of child we would adopt (other than they not be terminally ill) We saw the attorney to talk about adopting on Nov. 16, the birthmother was 6 months pregnant and had just been discovered, we don't know exactly what transpired before they found her....The attorney had been looking for a home for MJ for a while and couldn't find one, he was scheduled to go tell the birthmother on the 17th that he couldn't find a home for her baby and htat she would haveto go into Foster Care....60 families said no to her (boy did they miss out) We found out the day before Thanksgiving that wewere going to be able to adopt her....what a miracle.
I truly can't imagine my life without her, every step is a mile with her, although I have to say it is harder than I ever could have imagined. We had hoped to adopt more kids, but that is looking impossible now....With both of us Disabled and only Andrew to take care of us, life is tough, we have had to give up a lot, I am glad that we didn't have her younger, we couldn't have done it, of that I am confident.
Please feel free to ask any question at all, I am not shy about tlaking about her, me or our disabilities, especially if it helps people to understand.....
I wish you all the best! Good luck with everything. :wave:
