November is National Adoption Month.
It seems appropriate that a month dedicated to calling attention to the building of families through adoption would also be the month of the year when Thanksgiving is celebrated. In the U.S. alone, over 100,000 children are waiting for permanent homes and their “forever” families. One of those children might be waiting for you right now. There are a lot of reasons to adopt; however, the very best reason is because you want to be a parent.
When our kids were babies, strangers in grocery stores always asked a lot of questions. If they were satisfied with the answers, a lot of times their parting words would be, “what lucky children!” Looking back, I know that most of them meant well; however, that statement always made me imagine hoards of orphans standing around a huge roulette wheel that they took turns spinning, hoping to land on the word Family.
They are not the lucky ones. We did not save them. They saved us.
Adoptive families love each other exactly the same way that non-adoptive families do…imperfectly….messily…..and fully. I believe that there’s something really cosmic and unexplainable about who ends up with whom. Unless you have adopted yourself, it is difficult to explain. I didn’t understand until I saw the first photographs of my son and my daughter and knew, immediately, that they were the ones we’d been waiting for. Adopting is a leap of faith.
They are now grown, these two miracles of ours. They were not part of our original plan any more than we were a part of theirs. Even so, a life in which we would have lived separately from one another is unimaginable to me. Children born into a family are a blessing, that’s true.
A family created through adoption is, too.
For more information on domestic and foreign adoption visit:
http://www.mnadopt.org (Minnesota’s Waiting Children)
http://www.chsfs.org/internationaladoption (Children’s Home Society of MN)
The Loon Whisperer 
Yes, they were, my friend.
❤ Beautiful.