My thoughts and feelings

It's National Adoption Awareness Month.
And because for some reason other people think they know my thoughts and feelings better then I do, here are My true feelings:

• I LOVE adoption, I think it's a beautiful and wonderful thing.
• I love foster care. Not just because that's how my daughter came into life, I can't explain how or why, but I love it!
• I love my daughter's birth mom. She's become a good friend. I love talking to her and being around her. We share this beautiful daughter together and it's wonderful.
• I have not met my daughter's birth father, so don't get me wrong that I don't "love" him. I have not met him. I have been in contact with his brother, nothing bad to say about that.
• I believe in raising my daughter knowing about her birth family and where she came from. I don't want to cut her off from her birth mom.
• I have an entire binder and many computer documents for her that are all about her before we got her and her birth families info.
• I have many, many pictures. As many as I can find/ get of her and her birth family.
• I believe in doing what is best for my daughter, not what's best for me, or my family, it's all about my daughter when it comes to the adoption.
• Every night when I put Emma to bed I give her 3 kisses: one from me, one from dad and one from S.
• When I say "my daughter" and on my personal blog when I wrote about court and I said "She's mine" I don't mean it in any way to demean her birth family. Emma will forever be a part of her birth family, although she will be raised by us. After waiting for a child of my own for so long, only a fellow infertile can understand the longing for a child to call your own.
• I can't say if enough, the day that S decided to place Emma with us is a day I will never forget. Unless you were in that room with us that day, you will not understand the feelings and emotions that took place. But, it was truly beautiful!
• I LOVE that even though my daughter came to us through foster care she will always know that it was her birth mother's decision that she wanted us to be Emma's parents. She wanted her daughter to have a better life, one she knew she could not provide.
• The same goes for my son, it gives me chills every time I think about the first time S and I talked in person about him. I'll have to see if I've posted that story, I'm sure I have.
• It makes me so happy every time I talk to S about Emma's adoption. She is so genuinely happy for us that we got to adopt Emma! She is like a childhood friend that was there for all the rough infertility stuff and so now so thrilled that we got a child of our own... and she's our child's birth mom!!!
• S has the most respect for us as Emma's parents, it really does shock me! On Saturday she asked me, "Is it okay if I get Emma a birthday present?" She is always full of questions like that for us, "Can I give her these crackers?" "Do you care if I'm telling her no, because I don't want to tell her no when you guys are the parents and you'd say yes!" and FYI with the later questions, Em's was trying to dump her crackers all over the car! Ha ha, yes that would be a NO on the dumping!
• I love OPEN adoptions. As we started trying to adopt, I wanted an open adoption, One exactly like we have with S. When we decided to do foster care again I was bummed, I thought, there is no way we can have an open adoption now. But we do and it's amazing and I'm truly grateful for it and our relationship with S.