Forefront Stories: The Wolfe Family & Adoption (Part 1)
On Sunday, Aaron & Sherry Wolfe shared their families story of adopting a child from China and the whirlwind that God brought them through in having kids. You can watch their story here. I got a chance to sit down with Aaron & Sherry and ask them a little more about adoption, God’s leading, and what plans are in store for the future.
If you’ve ever thought about adoption, worried about how you could do it, or just wished someone could give you some insight, this interview is for you. Enjoy.
Interview Part 1:
So, how in the world did “adoption” hit the radar for your family? Was it an overnight thing that God just kind of spoke to you both or did something happen for you both that kind of led this decision along?
Sherry -We knew early in our relationship that we would have infertility issues, so we started talking about adoption even before we got married. It was something we have always been open to considering.
Our son, Luke, was conceived through infertility treatments. When he was 1 year old, we tried again, but it didn’t work. Infertility treatments are emotionally and physically draining as well as extremely expensive. Plus, there is a relatively low success rate. So we decided to turn to adoption. Adoption is a long road, but we knew we’d have a better chance at adding to our family again without feeling like we were throwing money down the drain.
Why international adoption? What are the pros/cons of international or local adoption?
Aaron – We decided pretty quickly that domestic infant adoption was not for us. We weren’t sure about having a birthmother choose us based on pictures and scrapbooks. We also weren’t sure how we felt about open adoptions, which is the case for most domestic infant adoptions these days. That’s where you keep in touch with the birth family. There are different levels of that, but we just weren’t sure how we felt about that. Also, this type of adoption can be very expensive.
We decided against adopting an older child from the foster care system because we felt strongly that Luke should be the oldest child in our family. This is something we’ve considered for the future.
We loved the thought of having different cultures in our own family, so we turned to international adoption. We chose China because we really wanted a girl and that was the only country our agency worked with that would allow us to specify gender.
These decisions were very personal for us. We definitely think each family should prayerfully consider all the options and make their own decision about what’s best for their family.
So what was it like going through the process of preparing/learning about adoption?
Sherry – It was very overwhelming at first! There is a lot of information out there and it’s sometimes hard to determine what is reliable. We went to a few Information sessions at different agencies to get all the information we could. We chose our agency, Holt International, because they are very well respected in the adoption community and they do a lot of humanitarian work in the countries they work in.
Holt also did a great job of walking us through the process. China requires a lot of paperwork and it has to be done in a very specific way.
When you finally were paired with Jacinda, how did God confirm it for the two of you?
Aaron – We were totally shocked when we got the phone call about Jacinda. We had expected to wait for up to 2 years and it had only been 6 weeks since we had finished our paperwork. We emailed her file to a doctor with CHKD and she told us that the medical information sounded like a fairly straightforward cleft lip and palate case.
You hear stories about how people look at their child’s picture and they instantly fall in love. It wasn’t really like that for us. We knew that Jacinda matched everything that we requested – under 2 years old, cleft lip/palate, and female. So it just seemed like a logical choice for us to say yes to her. It was after that when we really fell in love with her.
When we got to China and they brought her to our hotel room, she screamed. A lot. But after a couple of days, we started noticing some things that were very interesting …. Jacinda was exactly like Luke in several ways. They both love to hold their blankets up to their faces, they both love to eat, they are both very hot-natured, they sleep in exactly the same position, and they are both definitely not morning people! So she fit in to our family just fine!
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Check out the blog tomorrow for Round #2 of the interview and some words on how the transition from China to home went. Also, some thoughts on things God taught them about adoption and themselves.
Until next time,
*jdel
