How to tell people you've adopted some embryos

Embryo adoption can be difficult to explain to people!  Here is an excerpt from our family journal, explaining our choice to our friends and family.  I hope this helps some of you!

-Samantha

Just like each person and family is unique, adoption can look different in each family. For example.....

Some adoptive families look just like ours and its hard for some people to understand that we are in fact an adoptive family!!

Even harder to understand, some adoptions can look nearly unrecognizable to the untrained eye....need an example of that too? -Don't worry, I've got one :)

Curious what this means? It means our family is expecting a baby on July 28th! This time though, we have adopted embryos, rather than an already born baby, so its me that is pregnant. Crazy right?! There are so many reasons we chose to do it this way this time, experiencing pregnancy is simply just one of them. Other reasons are not going through failed adoption after failed adoption, controlling the prenatal environment (however, we were thrilled with our other two kids' prenatal environments..) and the main one is that once you have one healthy child in adoption land - its really hard to add more for some reason. 

I have struggled a little bit in deciding to do this. There are a few things that I really didn't/don't want to happen in this situation.

-I don't want people to be happy for me that I "Finally," get to experience pregnancy. I haven't been pining for that - I was pining to be a mom, and I have been one for about five years now. I am grateful to be pregnant, but mostly to be adding another person to our family. I have had a great pregnancy and it's been fun to be able to experience it, but it's not a bucket list item by itself. The new member of our family is the bucket list item :)

-I really don't want people to say, "I knew once you adopted you would have kids of your own!" Hello? Michaela and Heidi ARE mine. And this child is as genetically linked to me as my first two are - THEY AREN'T. Because of the power of the Temple though, they are mine, here on earth and forEVER.

-I really don't want my girls to think that I really wanted to be pregnant and I feel like I missed something with them. Truthfully? I can't imagine my life without my two little princess...AND their birthmom's/families/stories. They are such good girls and I love how they came into my life. This third child will be able to be breastfed and that is exciting to me, but not something I wished I could have done with my other two. I could have taken hormones and attempted to breastfeed them, but I didn't want to pretend they were biological, I wanted the world to know I am so proud of where they came from. Anyway, not to rant, I really just want people (you) to understand that a pregnancy is as much for me as it is for my current kids :)

SO. Be happy for us - WE ARE SO EXCITED! But don't be relieved for us, because we are so happy with how all our kids came here - all three of them! (Yikes...THREE KIDS!!)

This adoption is also open, we know the genetic family and love them very much. We are SO BLESSED in adoption to be able to have two healthy children with wonderful birth families, and another baby on the way with an equally wonderful genetic family. We are so happy to share our news with you and hope you share our joy with us! We truly feel blessed.