Reflections on our Adoption Journey

Now that we've been home with Eliana for over 2 weeks, we've had time to reflect on our journey through the entire adoption process. A few questions that have crossed our minds are:  Was it worth it?  Would we do it again? Would we do anything differently?

Let's start by answering the first question; was it worth it?  Absolutely!  All the trials and tribulations of paperchasing, waiting, and traveling to China were a small price to pay for that sweet little girl that is now our daughter.  Knowing what we know now, we would definitely go through the process to adopt our little angel.  But, will we do it again?  The answer to that is a certain no.  We feel now with our three wonderful children our family is complete and there will be no more children for us.  The strain both financially and emotionally (on all of us) of a fourth child is not something we want to pursue.

The question of what we would do differently is a bit trickier.  Of the aspects of the adoption process that we could control, there is nothing we would change.  We would not change our decisions on our agency, country, sex or age of child, or special needs.  The aspects of the adoption process that we would like to see changes of course, are the aspects we cannot control.  This would mostly include aspects regarding specific parts of the whole process.  We'll probably do more detailed posts on those issues another time but for example while we have no objections to the "donation" we had to make to the orphanage, we think there is room for improvement in how we had to make it.  Another example would be that we didn't have our in-country travel itinerary until just a few days before we left and there were aspects of it we would have done differently if we could have.

So, what is the future of this blog?  While, we recently started a "Krakower Family Blog" to document our family adventures (with pictures!  email me for the password but we do restrict it to family and friends) we will keep this blog going to discuss specific adoption related issues as they come.  While there will be no more status updates and posts might be less frequent we do feel there are many issues relating to adoption and our family that we would like to keep discussing.