I am so excited to finally be back and writing for Families.com. It has been almost a year since I took a leave of absence in order to work to get my children’s adoptions completed and get them home. I was so grateful to the Families.com management team for understanding and for their offer that I could come back when I was ready. Well, I’m finally ready and boy do I have an adoption story for you! I will start sharing that tomorrow so make sure you check back.
In the meantime, let me introduce myself again partly because I know this site has grown by leaps and bounds since I was here and there are many new members. My name is Rachel but my pen name is now Shoshanna Grey. For those of you who knew me before, I’m moving to a pen name and also pen names for my family members in order to protect everyone’s privacy since these posts are out in the World Wide Web for anyone to read. I don’t want my writing to be a source of embarrassment for my children in the future. I do realize that anyone who really wants to would probably be able to figure out my children’s names and put everything together – especially because I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to change the names in every blog I’ve written here on Families.com. But, at least when my daughter is in middle school and a classmate types her name into a search engine, they won’t come up with an article about her that might provide fuel to tease her. Adolescence is hard enough as it is without your mom writing about you all over the internet (or so teenagers tell me).
Now that I got that out of the way, let me tell you a little about myself and why I’m writing about adoption. Adoption has become a very important part of my life over the last 3 years. I knew that it would be part of my life from the time I was a teenager and read a book called The Family Nobody Wanted. The book is about a pastor and his wife who adopt twelve children who couldn’t be placed anywhere else. After reading that book I knew that I wanted a family like that. A family made up of different races, different backgrounds and different abilities but still a family because God brought them together. Of course, I had to grow up first and so it wasn’t until 2005 that my husband and I began to look into adoption and in fall 2005 we accepted the referral of a tiny baby boy named Erick. In January 2006 I started writing for Families.com so much of our adoption journey over that next year is actually chronicled here in the blog archives. Our little Erick went to heaven before we could bring him home, but God brought us joy when He blessed us with three more children, Laney, Miles and Josiah who came home in 2007.
We are now a family of five. Josiah, age 2 ½, joined us from Guatemala in January 2007. Laney, age 7 and Miles, age 5, joined us from Liberia in September 2007. We’re a family made up of three races and many different backgrounds. Our children came to us as a toddler and two older children and that has brought its special challenges, but also some amazing blessings. We believe that God has more children for us in the future and we look forward to watching our adoption story continue to unfold.
I look forward to sharing what I know about adoption with each of you and also learning from you through your comments and emails. If you have topics you would like for me to cover, please let me know. Thank you for reading and thank you for being involved in the world of adoption.