Why China? - Link 1

[This is the beginning of what I hope to be a slow meandering thread.]

Why did we choose to adopt from China? As mentioned in the past, before [Wifey] and I had gotten married we discussed interest in having children. I said I would be interested in starting a family, but not in any special treatments if it wasn't going to happen naturally. I felt that there were kids out there that should be adopted if our luck was bad.

As you know, our luck was bad.

Before going further, I have to say that I'm so, so thankful we had that talk before we got married. I think that having set the level of expectation, when we couldn't have any more children, then there was no debate or discussion of what to do next. So, the lesson here is that these "planning conversations" that engaged couples sometimes have are pretty critical, although it may not seem that way at the time.

But on the hand, you would not believe the number of married-couple friends of ours who never had the "kid talk" before they got married. When we're discussing [the Girl]'s adoption, I turn to them and say, "So did you guys have this talk?"

They kinda hang their head and go, "Ummm, no, not really. Didn't talk about having kids."

Aye Carumba!

Anyhoo, that was a diversion.

So when we turned to adoption, I said to [Wifey], "Ummm, no Eastern Europe. There's too much funky stuff with that process."

That was said with pure ignorance and lack of research, but it's what I said and what I felt at the time. I heard too many horror stories based on second hand parties to those horror stories.

But obviously, I think we were thinking about China because of my race and we had heard there was an agency in our town that specialized in Chinese (only) adoption.

And, I think back a lot to my grandma who was given up for adoption. Back in the "olden days", they didn't exactly have orphanages, so she was one of the lucky ones. I think the reason I was drawn to Chinese adoption is that my life story (if you read back in the archives) is an astonishing set of events that lead from a girl given up for adoption because she was a girl to a guy working at a Mega-lo-corp who is needing to adopt to grow a family.

Sorta an odd symmetry to this.

I didn't know about DTCs.
I didn't know about LIDs.
I didn't know about referrals.
I didn't know about rejections.
I didn't know about SN.

I just heard it was a fairly cut-and-dried (cough-cough) process and it sounded good.

Plus, she'd look funny like me.

That's it. Basically, why China was:

• It wasn't Eastern Europe
• It was an indirect homage to my grandma*
• It was a straightfoward process
• And, it is a situation where we were guaranteed that the birth mom was out of the picture.**
• And an agency that specialized in Chinese-only adoptions was based in our town.

*And of course the irony is that my mother hates Chinese adoption!
**It's the truth. It makes some people unhappy when I say this, but it's the truth for US.

Now, I send (metaphorically) this to ONE blogger who I know will read this and ask her, "Why China? - Link 2". Please don't feel you have to follow my template. Write up whatever you want, in whatever format you want, as long as it explains how and why you chose China.

Then, when you're done, designate another (SINGLE) blogger. I would suggest picking someone who blogs often as it's a greater chance that they'll respond and do the writeup and continue the chain.

OmegaMom, it's you for Link 2.

I'll update my link map below to show how and where this link is progressing.

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Updating Links:

So, it's come down to this -> OmegaMom ->Letters From the Zoo -> Figlet ->???