Why China

When we decided to adopt, China seemed like an obvious choice.  We know other families who have adopted from China, and 1 family in particular chose to share their experience with us.  They referred us to their Agency, and we went to an orientation about a month later.

The China Adoption program has a pretty long history, and has a reputation for healthy kids.  This was a deciding factor.  It was about a year-long process, which seemed like a "fair" amount of time.  Another factor was that it is not an Open Adoption. Another factor is that by adopting from China, we hope to be able to provide a very good sense of cultural identity, as our families are from China, too.

It was never our intention to adopt from China to "fly under the radar."  I know it happens (flying under the radar) and I know that some adoptions with similar ethnic backgrounds are intended to fly under the radar, even to the point of not telling the child.  Some cultures even do this within a family, when a unmarried girl (or young woman) finds herself pregnant, an older family member (maybe the the girl's mother and an aunt) will adopt or raise the child as theirs.  So even though we had some strong predictions that the child (probably a girl) would "look like us," we always knew we would be open (with her) about her history.

But we do (fly under the radar).  We've been a family for a few months now, and even with our family members, some are "forgetting" the adoption.  They forget that we didn't birth the Little Girl.  They forget that we didn't have breast milk for her, that we didn't do night feedings, that we skipped straight from formula only to formula and table food (she was already a year old with teeth), that she didn't inherit our genetic material.  The conversations that imply the forgetting aren't painful, though; so I guess it just means that as a family, we interact as if we've been together forever.  

It definitely feels that way.