Growing Connection As A Couple 

While Waiting To Adopt.

You've made the huge decision as a couple that you're ready to become parents through adoption. You have had deep conversations with one other, weighed the hopes and the possible challenges, and you've made the choice to dive headlong into a process that requires a whole lot of you. There's the researching, the soul searching, the vulnerable dialogue with social workers, the debating about what child needs you feel capable of supporting, the painstaking process of crafting your profile and birth parent letter, restructuring your finances, and there's the paperwork.......don't even get me started on the paperwork. SO. OVERWHELMING. And that's just the adoption layer. You've also started to dream about things like baby names or what tweens like hung on their walls, created pinterest boards for room decorating ideas, researched all the safest and coolest gadgets (including that "must have" stroller you need a side hustle to afford and what bottle nipples have the highest ratings).

Been there. Several times. Two of those times resulted in us becoming the grateful and proud parents of beautiful and wildly different girls. We became a family.

It also made us realize what having a new addition to the family does to your couples relationship. We didn't think much about that part much (or at all) when we were in the thick of our waiting period. We felt excited (and yes, stressed out in waves). We were just hanging in a constant state of anticipating waiting for the stupid phone to ring. And let me tell you, we were never so painfully aware of how many phone calls we get that aren't the announcement of an adoption match - there were days, I'll admit, that we felt tormented by people calling for what felt like inconsequential things because "DON'T YOU KNOW WE'RE WAITING FOR OUR BABY?" Don't you know how our hearts palpitate hard every time we hear that sound!?

Here's what we found out that we weren't as prepared for as we would have thought: how my partner and I would manage the night feeds, how we were going to talk about building resentment when there was a little one in earshot and we were running on zero sleep. How we would negotiate significant differences of opinions about people touching our newborns, or who we would leave our precious kid(s) with when we so desperately needed a break. How we would stay important to each other in a "couples sorta way" - not just as co-parents. When one or both of us was feeling completely drained and overwhelmed, how we were going to go about finding a way through it without doing damage to the relationship. What new boundaries do we need? How are we going to handle the expectations of extended family and the heightened dynamics that emerge and leave you blindsided. What about when we realize a couple years in that we have strangely unique hopes and visions for our kids' futures? Who knew it would bring all sorts of challenges to the surface that we could have prepared for better if we had only known about them?

If you had asked us before our girls were placed in our quivering arms, we would have said, "we're so ready for this....we're so on the same page". We weren't lying. We were ready in so many ways. We read books, set up a room, baby proofed the house, made announcements to our families, talked about how we’d want to handle openness with birth families, and planned ahead for who would take a leave from work that first year. But we later discovered what important conversations we missed. My goal is to let you in on the secret of those missed topics so you can put in place family-securing scaffolding around your beautiful couples relationship. We'll address key foundational principles based on the Gottman Institute's world renowned research on healthy families and what makes couples stick together well. This is a step in your preparation process you won't want to miss.

Join me on this 10 Part series, preparing you for things you didn't know you needed preparing for. When you're slumped over the crib at 3am, attempting to soothe an inconsolable baby for the 6th time and trying to reassess how the parenting roles didn’t pan out as you thought they would, you’ll be thankful you did.

Prepare Your Relationship...

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