Adoption
How to tell your family you're adopting?
My husband and I are ready to start the adoption process so we want to tell our families next week. They already know we will be adopting but just don't know when!
Any cute ideas? I thought about making a frame that says grown in our hearts for each set of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Any other ideas?
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Re: How to tell your family you're adopting?
We didn't go with cute. My family just heard the conversation go in that direction. DH's family was clueless, so we told his MIL when she came to visit. We gave her a copy of Adoption for Dummies and said she could ask us any questions she wanted. She let the rest of the family know.
No offense, but I would find it odd to get a framed "grown in our hearts" as a way to find out you're just starting the adoption process.
No offense taken! I wondered if that would be weird to give to family members.
Since we won't ever get to make a "we're pregnant" announcement to our family I thought I would take this opportunity to tell them. I could just get a grandparent picture frame.
Much like Dr.L, we didn't end up going cute either. We decided to incorporate our adoption news in the yearly newsletter - which included some PAL. But our immediate family already knew of our intentions and were given the news via phone and/or skype - that way they had time to absorb the news and ask questions.
Now, once we were matched we sent engraved photo frames and printed out "Photo Coming Soon.....We're Matched!" in a cursive type font and put that where the photo will go. Engraved was 'I Love My Nana' and 'I Love My Grandparents' at the top of their frame.
GL!
We had always said when going through fertility treatments if they didnt work we would adopt, so it was not that big of a shock when we told everyone, we just told our parents- I didn't think there was any reason to tell extended family, I let my mom tell my aunts and uncles. We just told them over dinner, and tried to answer any questions that they had about the process, we did not do any gifts or anything cute.
I actually didn't even tell my parents that we had a placement- we got DD on a Monday and my parents already had plans to come out for a visit that Wednesday- so we met them at the airport with the baby- that was a fun surprise!
I agree with Dr. L- to give a gift at this point is a bit odd- I would wait until you are actually matched or at least have your homestudy approved and are "paper pregnant" to do a gift. At this stage I would just tell everyone your plans and explain the process to them.
its a little different for us since we're doign international... we're adopting from Korea. There is A LOT of immigrations stuff to deal with, so we decided to wait until we were most of the way through to tell everybody.
we got matched in August, and STILL kept it a secret until this week! LOL don't know how... but it was really important to us to not tell until it was mostly a "sure thing". so anyway... what we did was put his picture on our annual christmas card (we always do a card with a pic of our dog anyway). so this years card had a picture of us, the dog, and our "future" son. we wrote a nice letter explaining that we were adopting, and not sure when he would be home but hoping by the spring.
we couldn't just mail the card to our parents so... the other day i was at my moms and she said "hey! did i ever get a card from you??" and i was like... well, you're going to freak out!" HAHA and i handed her the card. she started crying and was really excited. my dad, too- but he joked and said "thats about how old you were when you started tearing our house apart!" haha
DHs parents live almost 5 hours away, so he just called them and said " you're gonna have a shock when you get your christmas card!" LOL
it was kind of neat for them to be able to see a picture of him and say 'here is your grandson!"
We announced it over Christmas dinner last year. It was met with pretty reserved reactions, for the most part. I think, without a pregnancy to make it tangible, and give it a time frame, it was hard for everyone to really gauge how to react. So surprised and a little confused won out. We had only been TTC for a year, so I suspect there was a sense that we were impatient and jumping the gun. As it turns out, my intuition was right: we can't have kids, so we were right not to waste our time or money trying for long.
For your own sense of well-being, don't let less than enthusiastic reactions dampen your spirits, just in case your family acts similarly to ours. I hope they're over the moon about it though. This is a very exciting time for you!