Documenting your adoption journey

*This is a collaborative post*

It’s a beautiful thing to have a child, and there is more than one way to have one. It doesn’t matter whether you have endured years of heartache trying for a baby of your own before you had to adoption, or you start out just wanting to give a child who’s already looking for a family a fresh start, your adoption journey is a story of how you have gone from being just you to being you and your family. Families are made in different ways, and this is such exciting stuff to deal with. 

People might bring you adoption gifts rather than baby shower gifts, but the point here is that you are able to create your family from scratch because blood isn’t everything. Some of the memories that come with the journey of adopting a child aren’t always easy to look back on, but if you could document your adoption journey and be able to look back on it one day with a smile, then why wouldn’t you? Remembering is important, even the hard times, and whether you prefer to write, take photos, or audio record everything, here are some tips for documenting that adoption journey.

Image source: Pexels

– Get writing. Buy yourself a beautiful journal and start to write down your feelings each day. You don’t need to have elegant prose nor do you need to make it chapter and verse. Your journal can be filled with 31 page entries or even just a few simple lines at a time with the date and what was happening on that day so that you can record it all. It’s your diary, it’s your journey, it’s everything you need to do to make sure that you can look back and smile.

– Take pictures. All of those smiles and tears and candid emotions that you feel along the way should be taken. Selfie here, road trip there, all of these documented photos can be added to albums for you to look back on and show your child one day. Everybody you meet along the way, all the social workers and all of the experts that you deal with should go in your memory books. When you take pictures together, all you are doing is cementing just how important and special this journey has been.

– Start scrapbooking. Whether you adopt locally or you go abroad and adopt A child, scrapbooking can give you something to hand your child one day to tell them the story of how they came to be in your family. Blending important quotes and passages, photos and small objects such as cards and souvenirs from your physical journey into one book gives you and your child a legacy that you can look back on.

– Create a video diary. As you decide to go from a personal fertility journey to an adoption journey, set up a camera and start documenting day-to-day what you’ve been doing. Talk about how you feel in the same way you would in a journal, but on camera instead. If you take the time to organise pictures and videos while they’re fresh in your memory and create your own channel for them, others may feel inspired by the journey you have gone down to be able to adopt throughout the process.

Thanks for reading xxx