Why/How We Chose Judah

And I love when people ask me about adoption and give me the chance to talk about it. The other day at work someone looked at the family picture on my desk and asked me if we adopted the youngest one. I looked at the picture, smiled, and looked at my client and said "nope, he came out natural like that". Of course, I couldn't hold a straight face when I said it. Friday I had lots of people ask me about Judah or about adoption. It was great but I love to talk about it so much that I feel like I can't share with them while I'm at work or I need to take an early lunch if I want to take time to share with those who are truly interested.

Last night some friends asked me how we chose Judah. Interesting question. So I explained to them and thought I'd explain it here real quick. There's two main ways to adopt through Holt (the agency we chose). One is the waiting child program which is a list of kids who haven't yet been matched because of age or special needs. We looked at this option and there weren't children on there that fit our criteria (being younger than Scott). So we went with the traditional method where a child became available for adoption and was matched with us. So the match with us to Judah was that Holt sent us a profile with his known background both socially and medically. Most people review the profile and talk to their doctor about it. Ryan and I had already decided that we would take whoever we were matched with. We didn't want to choose. We couldn't choose our first two (or I would've chose kids without bowel issues) so why would we choose the child we were adopting. We said that we wanted to care for a child in need of a family and the child being presented to us fit that bill.

Now, with that said, it's not like we didn't put any parameters on the child we would take. Holt says they want your oldest to stay the oldest. Ryan wanted the same so we had to have a child younger than Scott. We also knew that we were somewhat limited in the availability of medical help living in a small rural community. So, we limited the "special needs" to things that wouldn't require us driving 90 miles one way to s specialized doctor several times a week. So there you have it, we really didn't choose Judah. But we gladly accepted him as part of our family.