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Learn about the process of adopting from China, and share our daily life with our wonderful little Cassie!

November 30, 1999

Hello, and welcome to my diary!

I’m Michele, the proud Mommy of Cassie, who will be 22 months old next week. My husband, Jonathan, and I adopted Cassie almost exactly one year ago from the Fujian province of China.

Cassie is funny, beautiful, so smart she scares us, very gregarious and never stops moving! She is a great sleeper and a good eater. She loves dogs, Elmo, Maisy books (but not the videos), water (drinking it, swimming in it or bathing in it), milk, carrots, her favorite blankie, her backyard swing set and the swings at the park across the street from our house. She loves kids, especially babies. And she is just the center of our universe. She is the perfect child for our family!

Before we adopted Cassie, Jonathan and I went through several years of infertility treatment that you can read about, if you’re interested, in the old diary I had on preconception.com. We had never considered adoption, we just focused on the bio baby! Our infertility treatment ultimately failed, but I learned a lesson from it that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world: the most important thing to me was to parent a child, not to be pregnant or give birth or to have a child who was genetically related to us. I wanted someone to call me Mommy, someone to worry about when she had a cold, someone to brag about to friends and family. I wanted to feel little arms around me tight, a drowsy head on my shoulder. I wanted to watch Jonathan teach her about baseball and sit with him after she’d gone to sleep and talk about all the amazing things she’d done that day. I wanted everything that came with parenthood, even the not-so-rosy things.

I was already researching adoption when we learned that our one and only IVF had failed. Though we have to pay for that out-of-pocket (OUCH), our insurance would pay for several more IUIs (inseminations). In thinking about that, I just kind of fell apart. I thought that I’d handled the stress very well, using humor and pretending that it was no big deal to run our lives by scheduled injections. At first, I’d loved all of it. Now, I thought of infertility treatment as a roller coaster of ups and downs, and I just couldn’t face doing it again. I was done with it.

I’d already decided that China was the place for us when Jonathan, after considering it for only three weeks, agreed that we should adopt. I told him about my research and reasoning and “why China.” He said that he knew I’d thought it out and done my homework, and if I wanted to adopt from China, that’s what we’d do.

That was in November of 1999, nearly three years ago. A lot has happened in our lives since then! I’ll tell you more about it in later diary entries. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you’ll use the “Talk to Me” board to tell me about yourself and also, what you think of this diary!

For now,
Michele