Matthew, Brynn and Jackson's Adoption Story

We have a unique story and I wanted to take the time to share it.  In March of 2008 we adopted our baby boy Jackson from American Adoptions. He has truly been a blessing to us and I wanted to share the story of how we came to be a family!  

We had been looking into adoption for about a year before we actively started pursuing an agency as we had already gotten a home study completed.  Brynn had sent for an information packet and we had submitted our application to American Adoptions to begin the process when we stumbled across the "Adoption Situations" link on their website.  There they post situations that fall out of the scope of the "normal" program categories. That is where sweet little Jackson's situation was listed, he had already been born. Brynn called Matt and read him the situation and asked him if they could request more information about the situation. She emailed Sarah one of the counselors assigned to the situation and asked for more information and that we were interested. Sarah provided us with more information and asked us for our homestudy. We also put together a "mini" profile as we had not gotten that far in the process with the agency. That is where the waiting game started. Sarah had to meet with birth mom and present her the profiles for her to choose from. The wait was nerve racking as we waited for Sarah to get back to us on if we were chosen or not.  We received the call a few days later. Gloria liked our profile and wanted to talk to us!  We had a conference call to talk with Gloria - it was pain staking knowing that this woman would decide our future on if we could be the parents of her child! She liked us and decided that she wanted us to be her childs parents. Over the next few days we scrambled around to get the documents needed together and to prepare to go and get Jackson...we got everything done in time but the agency had lost contact with birth mom and she needed to sign the TPR. We waited and waited to find out when she was going to sign so we could get our baby. Days turned into weeks-the wait was excrutiating. Then we got the call that they had located birth mom and she was going to sign. We could make the trip down within 24 hours. We could hardly believe what had transpired within a months time. We went from just looking at agencies to being matched to a baby boy. We traveled down to get him-we had a nice lunch with Gloria and the social worker she was working with. He is a beautiful baby and we melted at the first sight of him!  It was Easter when we went to get him so we spent a nice Easter weekend with our extended family and they all got to meet our new son!  It has been over a year now and we communicate with him birth mom via email-she receives pictures and letters. Our experience was not a typical situation but we hope to work with American Adoptions when we decide to adopt again!