Jenny and Derek's story
Raising a child together was something Derek and I had always wanted to do, from the very beginning of our life together as a couple. Our journey through infertility treatments was bumpy and hard, although not entirely unexpected. In the fall of 2006, we made the decision to stop treatments and investigate adoption in order to begin building our family. What a liberating choice! All of a sudden, the weight and sadness of "failure" was lifted off of our shoulders. We knew that preparing to adopt was a fair amount of work and time-intensive, but suddenly we felt like we had so much more control over our destiny.

In the fall and winter of 2006, we went to informational meetings for three separate adoption agencies and requested information on a number of others. We chose to work with ASC because of its smaller size and because the staff seemed to care deeply about all three sides of the adoption triad - the birth parents, the adoptive parents and the children. Working with ASC was wonderful - everyone was so helpful. We truly felt like they were on our team and were as eager for us to become parents as we were!

We began our application process in mid-January 2007. There was a lot of paperwork, several meetings to attend, and, of course, the home study process. It took us about two full months to get everything completed. We decided to adopt domestically because bringing home a newborn was important to us. Additionally, we elected to go with plans 1 and 3 together because it allowed us to be shown to the maximum number of potential birthmothers. At 11:00 AM on March 13, 2007 we learned that we were officially active with the agency. This meant that we were 100% ready to have our information shown to birthmothers. That same day, just five hours later, I received a call from Tere letting us know that we had been chosen, and furthermore that our birthmother was due the following day! We went from hoping to be parents within a year to a single day!

Like most babies, however, Ethan was not born on his due date. We ended up having another nine days to prepare ourselves and our home, which seemed like the longest nine days of our lives. I will never, ever forget the phone call from Tere telling us that our son had been born. The only information we had at that time was that he was healthy, was a boy, and had curly hair and a cute nose, but it was enough information for me to call and e-mail almost everyone I knew to tell them.

The next day, we traveled to the hospital, and were able to meet the beautiful, brave and remarkable woman who gave birth to our son. Words simply cannot describe the mixture of emotions when she handed me the tiny, bundled up little human...joy, sadness at her heartbreak, amazement that the moment we had been waiting for so long was finally there. We still had not decided on a name, but with the help of his birthmother decided to name him Ethan James.

As I am writing this, Ethan is nearly nine months old. He is gorgeous, smart, hilarious and loved deeply by so many people. Parenting is such a fun and incredibly rewarding journey. I find that I am grateful now that we did not conceive a child because if we had, we would not have Ethan. I know that the whirlwind speed of Ethan's adoption is unusual, but the depth of our love and family bond is not. We were meant to be his parents just as he was meant to be our son.