The Adoption Seminar

May 28, 2005 Free seminar will discuss adopting Chinese children Clay County Line (local newspaper supplement) A free seminar on how to adopt abandoned children from China will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at St. Giles Presbyterian Church, 116 Fox Ridge Road in Orange Park. Hundreds of thousands of infants, mainly girls, are abandoned by their parents in China, according to the Chinese Children Adoption International of Florida, a non-profit agency and a division of Chinese Children Charities, a Colorado-based agency devoted to the well-being and cultural enrichment of Chinese orphans. The agency placed more than 120 children in Florida in the last year. The seminar will cover the history, the home study processes, costs and how to qualify. For information or reservations, call TC at (850) 878-8788 or visit http://www.chinesechildren.org/. We signed in and picked up the flyers at the door and found a table to sit at. There were four other couples attending along with one single lady accompanied by her parents. We were definitely the oldest couple in attendance. I was definitely the oldest of everyone. Thank heavens I have a young and gorgeous wife. In addition there was a lady there with her adopted Chinese daughter who shared her experience with the process. Her daughter by the way was beautiful. TC, from the Tallahassee office, put on the CCAI presentation. The room was noisy due to a soda machine humming in the background but the attention was on the adoption process. We watched a video presentation (we have a copy of the DVD) on how CCAI was started and why. The meeting ended with Mr. C answering questions from the group. What to do? What to do? We have a lot to discuss…

Adopting! At Your Age?

Adopting! At your AGE? This all started many years ago, when bearing a biological child didn’t seem like it would be in our future. We inquired about artificial insemination, in-vitro, etc, as a solution including adoption within the USA. Nothing really seemed right for us for various reasons. Alyson, in particular, could not make up her mind about any choices discussed and kept hoping a pregnancy would “just happen”. *DISCLAIMER NOTICE (That last sentence was written by Alyson – not Ford) We eventually made the decision to “inquire” about foreign adoption. We attended a Chinese Children Charities informational meeting conducted at the St. Giles Presbyterian Church in Orange Park.

The Beginning

May 27, 2005 The Beginning: The posts from May 27 to October 1, 2005 originally began as our private journal notes. We had not yet begun to blog and were capturing our adoption journey to someday share with Alyzabeth An. We eventually uploaded the journal to blogspot and thus began our blogging adventure. We hope you enjoy following along. Welcome to our adventure…