There's our son! (one year later)

One year ago yesterday we saw Jaden's face for the first time.  True, it was only in a picture, but still ... :-)

We looked at this picture about a million times!  How do you fall in love with a picture?  When it's a picture of your son, it just happens.

Estimates are that there are 147 million orphans in the world. That's a really big number, and can be daunting. How do you find your child out there? Step one is to start looking! So we did. And somehow when we saw Jaden's picture, we knew. That smile, that look, I don't know, but somehow we knew.

A question that we have had many times is "How did you find him?"  There are many advocacy sites on the internet, but the two that we used to find Jaden were Advocate for WC on Yahoo and RainbowKids.com. 

It amazes me how many children are on these sites that have needs that would be considered minor and easily correctable here, and yet they just sit on the list parentless. Which means that these children continue to be in an orphanage without a mama or a baba.

Anyway, one approach is to find a child that you are interested in via an advocacy site and then to contact the adoption agency that has the child's file. This is the approach that we used. 

A second approach is to pick an adoption agency first and then give that agency a list of potential special needs that you are comfortable handling.  These special needs can be from the relatively simple and often purely cosmetic like multiple nevi (moles) to the very complex such as severe heart disease.   Some people who take this approach wait months and months to be matched to a child, while we were "matched" as soon as we saw Jaden and requested his file, which meant that we were able to move forward with bringing Jaden home as soon as possible.  

The picture of Jaden was already out of date when we saw it because it had been taken when his "file" was being created, which was several months before it was released and we found him.  And he had already grown up so much from the time that picture was taken until the day that we got to hold him.  But that picture is forever planted in our minds, kinda like our version of his baby picture.

And here he is one year later.  :-)

Having fun in Fort Jaden

 

Our little guy ... then and now