Domestic Adoption - Designated/Identified Adoption Program

Designated Adoption Stories

Finding Olivia…

Once the paperwork was in place and we were waiting to be matched with a birthparent, I found the waiting to be more difficult than I’d imagined. I wanted to do more to reach out to birthparents so I could feel like I was doing something to help the cause. My husband and I built a simple website based off our family profile with LSS and added the contact information for our caseworker and us. I then sent an e-mail to everyone I had an e-mail address for, with a link to our web page and a reminder that we were seeking a baby to adopt. I asked all our friends and family to forward our information to everyone they knew, in hopes it would fall into the hands of someone who would make a connection for us.

Less than three weeks later I received a call from my financial planner. He had gotten my message and knew a young lady at his church that was looking for a family to adopt her baby. He showed her the website, and her caseworker contacted ours, exchanged some basic information and set up a meeting for us and the birthmother. She was deciding between us and one other family.

The day before our meeting, her caseworker contacted me to let me know she had gone into labor. She asked us to come to town anyway, and we would stay in touch about scheduling our meeting. That night we got the call that the baby girl had been born and that the birthmother was anxious to choose a family, so we would meet the next day as planned.

When we met Sarah, we thought she was awesome. She was exactly what we had always pictured in the back of our minds when thinking about birthmothers. She clearly wanted her baby to have a family that could devote all the time and attention that a young single college student could not. It was only about twenty minutes after we left that meeting that the phone rang again. This time, it was the caseworker asking us to come back to the office, Sarah had signed the papers and we could go see our baby at the hospital.

We were so excited! Finally everything was falling into place. We went to the LSS office, then to the hospital to meet our daughter. She was only 23 hours old when we got there. We got to spend that first night in the hospital with her, in a private room. The nursing staff let us do all the feedings and diaper changes, and we got to meet the doctor who delivered her when she was discharged the next day. It was a great to have the opportunity to start bonding with her so soon after she was born.

By Melissa, Ed and Olivia