So now that God had our attention, we went to work. We met with the lawyer in Kalamazoo and although he is great at what he does, this situation didn’t feel quite right to us. He deals with a number of relinquishments and situations that involve Childrens Protective Services. This just didn't seem like what God had planned for us.
Because of this, we decided to meet with an adoption agency. But before we did, we had dinner with some friends from church, Paul & Beth. This couple has two beautiful adopted daughters along with two remarkable biological sons and we wanted to hear more of their story. Dinner was a wonderful time of fellowship and we learned much about their two different adoption experiences. This is also when we heard about Adoption Associates (AAI), the agency in Jenison that Paul and Beth had used to help them adopt each of their girls. It is such a blessing to have close friends who have experienced this journey. Our church has a number of couples who have adopted and they are all great sounding boards and always willing to listen and answer questions.
In February of 2011, right before a vacation to Florida for our 10th anniversary and to celebrate with my grandparents on their 50th, we set up a meeting with the AAI. Right away this seemed like a good option to us. Adoption Associates is a Christian agency based in Michigan and has 20+ years of experience serving adoptive parents like us, birth parents like Sophia, and children like baby Cooper. They offer too many services to mention here, but we were primarily drawn to the services offered to the birth parents – pre and post placement counseling seemed to us like a big benefit. We wanted our birth mom to be able to have her needs met too. AAI is a place that really helps the birth parents to make the right plan for their situation rather than just steering them toward adoption. We felt like this made the adoption opportunity more of a planned choice.
If you are looking at adoption, we would definitely recommend that you check them out at www.adoptionassociates.net.
Next time we’ll get into a little of the the nitty gritty about the process of adoption...
Ephesians 1:5
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