We are very excited (and a bit in shock) to welcome our son Henry! We met his birth family last week, and brought him home on April 14th. We are beyond thrilled - he's a delightful, beautiful baby. And now we are trying to assemble an Ikea bureau and figure out baby equipment with sleep deprived parent brains. We have been trying to have a baby for the past few years, but it wasnt working out and overall was quite dispiriting. So at the end of 2015 we decided to put our energy (and resources) into adoption, a way to grow our family with a more hopeful and positive outcome. We hit the ground running in January and just wrapped up our home study in March. Typically it takes from 6 to 18 months after the home study before a successful match, but we were incredibly lucky and were almost immediately connected with an amazing family. Now, barely three months after our first orientation session, we are holding our son! In addition to the normal battery of supplies a family needs to welcome a newborn, we now have the second half of the adoption agency fees due. Our plan was to build our savings (which were depleted by IVF costs and the first half of the agency fees) during the wait for a match but because of our sped-up timeline, we decided to start a fundraiser for this half of the adoption fee. The advantage of parenting at our -advanced- age is that we received almost everything we needed as hand-me-downs from friends and family! So we hope that people will see this as a stand in for our baby shower. Thanks for your help and well wishes! Love, Alice, Will, and Henry
