This is a guest blog post written by Amy Stewart, mom through adoption to five children, Pediatric RN, and founder of Hope in Adoption, LLC.

After five pregnancy losses and years of failed fertility treatments, my journey to parenthood felt hopeless. The pain, grief, and loneliness I was experiencing felt too much to bear. It seemed everyone around me was celebrating carefree, successful pregnancies with ease. As my husband and I considered adoption as an opportunity to grow our family, the extensive process quickly became legally, financially, and emotionally overwhelming. Yet adoption seemed to provide hope in a time of darkness and despair. As a Registered Nurse and parenting educator, I started Hope in Adoption LLC to provide evidence based research parenting education and parenting support to all, including traditional, adoptive, and same-gender parents. My mission is to help everyone adopt parenting tools that work.

Does the brokenness and sadness inherent in adoption hit you at the weirdest times?

I have an odd combination of interests, I am a huge college football and basketball fan having spent part of my career working in college athletics, but I also absolutely love musical theater having grown up in that world. Luckily my husband is usually game to catch a musical with me, and last week we went and saw the revival of Miss Saigon when it came through town. It was one of the few popular musicals I hadn’t seen, and I was so excited to go even though I was exhausted due to my two toddlers’ sleep regressions and newfound middle of the night fears.

October 7 - today marks four years to the day a sweet baby boy was born, a baby I thought was mine. This day still makes me a little sad and nostalgic, even though I would not have taken home my daughter Cora two months later had we adopted this little guy. To read more about the adoption loss that lead to my daughter, click here.

This guest blog post is written by Kirstyn of Travis and Kirstyn, currently our longest waiting Purl Family. Kirstyn writes about the difficulties she’s experienced in the adoption wait, and her hope that the child meant for her arms is coming.

“The Wait”. In the adoption world, those two words refer to the time between when you are home study approved, or legally certified to adopt, and when a child is legally placed in your family and can no longer be returned to his/her biological family. This month marks a year of our “waiting” process (7 months as a Purl client), and I never imagined it would this challenging and painful.

This blog piece is written by a guest blogger who has adopted two children through domestic infant adoption. I believe strongly that parents through adoption should protect their child’s story, that’s why this piece is being shared anonymously.

I’m totally in love with a woman who gave me so much of herself, so much of myself. And I hate her. I struggle reconciling these opposite, intense feelings, all for one person. How can I love someone so tragically?  How can I hate her when I feel such gratitude? It was through counseling that I learned how normal it is. It was through counseling that I learned this is what it’s like to love an addict.

If you’re a prospective adoptive parent, you may have already learned that there is an amazing adoption community on Instagram. You can learn from and connect with all sides of the adoption triad through this platform. I definitely recommend my Purl families follow various professionals and influencers in the adoption community on Instagram to prepare themselves further for their own adoption journey, listening to perspectives from adoptees and birth mothers in particular. I find that competitors are collaborating and supporting each other to educate prospective adoptive families and the general public about adoption, and I find that so refreshing. To see some of my favorite adoption influencer accounts on Instagram, read more!

This guest blog post is written by Ashley, a mother of three daughters through infant adoption. Her and her husband Jason are a former Purl family.

I’m raising three girls--my daughters--whose identities will be different from mine in a fundamental way. They were all adopted at birth, and unlike me, are raised by parents and others in our village who do not share their biology. This isn’t a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around anymore and while it shifts my identity as a mother and distances me from the experiences of most mothers I know just a bit, my entire family has been built on love and choice and taking purposeful steps forward, not blood--which I appreciate and feel great pride in. More importantly, though, this adoptee identity is one my children will wrestle with, wrestling that I can’t do for them. To read more, click the link below.

What if you could give your adoption profile to an expectant parent who is considering adoption at the exact moment she is asking herself, “How do I place my baby for adoption?” What if you could do this 40, 60, or even 80 times? Each month! This is what Google advertising offers adopting parents.

Google Ads is an online advertising platform. It encompasses several different types of ad approaches, but for simplicity (and I believe they’re the best type for adopting parents), we’ll focus on pay-per-click, or PPC ads.  To learn more, click here.

This guest blog post is written by Torie DiMartile about her own experience as a transracial adoptee.

Last week, in national news, a white supremacist opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The same week, in my little university town of Bloomington IN, the farmers market endured its second week of cancelled activity due to white supremacist threats. If you ask my mom, she’ll readily tell you that 26 years ago these terrifying racial headlines would have flickered across her screen with a pang of sympathy, but they would not have drastically impacted her daily life. Of course, she knew racism and violence existed, but it existed outside her own experience. Today, as the mother of a 26-year old transracial adoptee those headlines probably keep her up at night. To read more, click here.

Recently, I watched the Red Table Talk where Jada Pinkett Smith and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, hosted former Sex and the City star Kristin Davis for a talk about transracial adoption. I really enjoyed this podcast and think it can help many families considering transracial adoption (I look forward to including a post just about transracial adoption soon). However, one thing I found really interesting about this podcast was that both Jada and her mom were very surprised that the birth mothers for Kristin’s two African American children had actually chosen Kristin to raise their babies. That made me realize that there are probably many other people that don’t understand the domestic adoption process, and that it might help to educate about how adoptive parents are typically chosen - usually through the use of an adoption profile. To read more, click here.

These are a few of the signs that hang in my daughters’ room. Both speak to where each of our girls come from, and what we believe…

I know that parenting a biological child along with a child through adoption presents different challenges than parenting two children who were adopted, or even two biological children. I am sure it is very different for an adoptee to grow up with siblings who look like their parents or a sibling that shares an adoption connection…

This blog post is written by an adoptee, psychologist and prospective adoptive mother.

When I came home that first day, my parents could hardly believe I was real. They had grieved their dreams of parenthood, settling on a baby bulldog. My mom had multiple miscarriages due to endometriosis, and was told by her doctor that she couldn’t have a baby. She learned this news while working as a counselor for women with unplanned pregnancies. She never disclosed her personal struggle to become a mom until one night a phone call from a co-worker from the adoption agency would change the course of all of our lives.

This blog post is written by a guest blogger and is a perspective we don’t get to hear very often, the perspective of a dad through adoption.

I’ve always had a favorable view of adoption.  I have a niece who was adopted by my sister and her husband.  Although I’m quite sure there have been tough times, I always saw a well adjusted family with love in their hearts. Because this was my experience, when my wife and I began looking into adoption to grow our family, I was not skeptical.  I was completely optimistic.

Immediately upon beginning the adoption process you are presented with life changing questions…

A guest writer shares her experiences with anxiety in her pre-teen son through adoption.

Anxiety and the adopted child often times go hand-in-hand. The hard part about diving into adoption is you have no idea the issues you will experience with your child as they grow and face the realities of their story. Every adoptee has to face their story in different stages of life. I can only speak to walking with my child on his adoption story for the last 10 years, but one of the themes I have experienced with my son is that anxiety and adoption tend to go together.

When my husband Ray and I started the adoption process, the thing we were scared about most was “open adoption”. We learned quickly that most domestic adoptions were “open”, but that had many different meanings. We pictured open adoption as a co-parenting situation, and had fears that our child wouldn’t bond with us or feel like we were her “real parents” if we had an open adoption with our child’s birth family (and yes I cringe too that I even wrote “real parent” in my blog as something I thought and possibly even said out loud)! Luckily we learned a lot over the course of our adoption journey.

Oh Mother's Day ... you can bring so much joy and so much pain to so many. When I was single and in my mid-30s, I often wondered if I'd ever be a mother. Mother's Day seemed to be the day where someone stuck a knife in my heart a little and twisted it around, as I watched my friends and family celebrate a role I desperately wanted.  When I finally met my husband, got married and started trying for a family, we went through a round of IVF that failed right before Mother's Day. Probably due in part to all the hormones I still had flowing through my body, I remember bursting into tears during our Pastor’s message at church, ultimately leaving early and ignoring the holiday altogether the rest of the day.

This week is Infertility Awareness Week. Infertility sucks - there’s really no other way to put it. Actually, I can think of a lot of words I’d use to describe infertility, but most of them would need to be censored.

Happy Tax Day! If you’re a prospective adoptive family, you might be interested in learning more about the Adoption Tax Credit and how you might benefit from it if/when you incur expenses relating to the adoption of a child. The credit, which has been part of federal tax law since 1997, allows adoptive families to defray some of the costs incurred when they grow their families through adoption. It has helped bring together hundreds of thousands of families, many of whom would not have been able to grow their families through adoption without it.