I just wanted to let you know how happy we are with American Adoptions. I always read the newsletters that you email and one of the questions someone asked awhile back is why they do not see more follow up letters from the families once they have adopted. The response at the time was that once the families have a child placed with them, they become very busy and are so overjoyed that they either forget or do not have the time to write. I had read this and thought how do they not have the time to write about something so important that has happened or at least share their experience with others? Seeing that we adopted our baby 7 months ago and I am just now finding the time to write you a letter makes me understand it a whole lot better.

After 3 years of infertility treatments, my husband and I decided we needed to start living our lives without the constant timetable of medications and procedures. We had considered using a surrogate but then we had heard of someone who had used your agency and had fantastic results. Our dream was to start a family and we felt that American Adoptions were the ones that could help us. We were very nervous at first and a little overwhelmed, but everyone at your agency was so helpful and guided us thru the whole process. We began the paperwork in March, 2006 and I will never forget Aug 22, 2006 when Megan emailed us to congratulate us on being activated. We had prepared ourselves that it may be awhile before we heard anything so we tried to keep ourselves busy and had even done a little bit of traveling. On 2/7/07, just 6 months later, we had received our first call that there was someone who was outside our APQ that we may be interested in. Although we were afraid that if we said no another match may not be in the near future, we stayed with our original plan and decided to wait. Just 20 days later we received the news that someone fit our APQ perfectly. To say we were happy is an understatement. We could not wait to speak with our match on a conference call but we were also nervous-what if they didn’t like us? What if we sounded as nervous as we felt? We even tried to write down some notes to help us in case there was a lull in the conversation. The first call went well but with 5 people on the line, it was a little hard to hear everyone. We were thrilled when the birth parents had asked if we could converse via email. We set up a new email account (without our last name) and for the next three weeks, the birth mother and I really bonded. The birth father and my husband would converse thru us since neither one are really in to emailing. This was such a great way for us to get to know each other. They sent us pictures and even one of the ultrasounds. The birth mother was being induced in April, so we started getting things ready right away. We had celebrated our activation by purchasing some neutral color things for a nursery but now we knew the birth mother was having a girl. We knew that the birth mother could always change her mind and that we probably shouldn’t have decorated as much as we did, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We “pinked” up the nursery and had already chosen a girl’s name. Since the birth mother was being induced, we had the advantage of planning our flight a little in advance.  We arrived at the hospital the day the birth mom was being induced and we were nervous to meet the birth parents face to face. When we walked in to the room, the first thing she did was give us both a big hug. Right then we knew we could not have had a more perfect match if we had picked them ourselves rather than vice versa. The birth mother even gave me the other wrist band so that I would have unlimited access to the nursery. We had frequent visits with the birth parents and two days later the phone in our hotel room rang at 2:00 am. It was the birth dad saying that our baby girl had just been born 20 minutes ago and he said it all happened so fast that he felt bad he couldn’t call us sooner. The hospital was only 5 minutes away so we were holding our baby girl within minutes. What a special time that was, all of us were in the room and we even took pictures of all of us together. The staff at the hospital knew our situation and even gave my husband and I an empty room to use so that we could have alone time with the baby. We still continued to visit the birth parents but knew they needed their “alone time” as well. We were in constant contact with both Jennifer and Megan at American Adoptions and they were both so helpful. Although they were not in the same state they made sure we had all the contacts and we never once felt lost or confused.