November is a time to be extra thankful. And for our little family, it?s a time to be extra extra thankful as we celebrate adoption and the way that it?s shaped us.
National Adoption Month began as Adoption Week back in 1976 in the state of Massachusetts as way to promote awareness of the need for adoptive families for children in foster care. Since then it?s grown to a national level and has expanded from just a week to the entire month of November. There is even an annual presidential proclamation about it! Though the focus is primarily to draw attention to the needs of children in foster care, it is also a time to celebrate adoption and the ways in which it touches the lives of so many.
This year?s focus is Adoption in the Digital Age. The organizers at the Children?s Bureau hope to ?help States harness the power of social media to recruit and retain parents for the over 104,000* children and youth in foster care waiting for permanent families.? They are partnering with the AdoptUSKids website to provide resources and information for professionals, prospective adoptive parents, and youth.
While foster care is not in our immediate future (though we do hope to provide respite foster care once our children are a little older!), we will certainly help spread the word and spread awareness this month. Watch out, Facebook friends!
If you are interested in ways you can help, here are some great ideas from the AdoptUSKids website:
- Become a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA)
- Mentor a child in foster care
- Offer free photography and videography services to adoption agencies (we were able to receive free photography services for our first family portraits and I cannot tell you valuable they are to us!)
- Become a respite care provider
- Fundraise or donate supplies to foster care organizations
And if you are interested in international adoption, here is a great place to start. Feel free to contact me, too! I am always to happy to share about our story and any information to help prospective adoptive parents.
We are hoping that we will have something to be extra extra extra thankful for during this National Adoption Month ? we are hoping to have our homestudy finalized within the next few days so it can be sent to Korea in order for us to be ?officially? waiting for our referral of a little Cowgirl. From then, it will probably be another long 12-20 months until we are actually matched with a lil? CG, but until then, we will wait as patiently as possible, because as we found with our first adoption, it is SO worth the wait.
*Statistics on waiting children, including children in foster care awaiting adoption, are taken from the most recent Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) report, which provides government statistics for FY 2011.
Source: http://www.hellobee.com/2012/11/02/its-national-adoption-month/
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