Adopting an Adventure
Eric and Heidi are our second military family that we are featuring in this year’s Veterans Day Testimonial Tuesday.
Eric is an engineering assistant for the 17th Air Force in Landstuhl, Germany, where the couple currently lives. Around this time, they created a blog called “The Adventures of Eric and Heidi,” to detail all of the exciting events happening in their lives. Soon, it turned into a blog about their adoption adventure, and what a story it turned out to be!
Keep in mind that Eric and Heidi’s story is definitely the exception and not a typical adoption story. If you are interested in adoption, remember that all adoption stories are different, and the important thing is to stay flexible and patient, just as Eric and Heidi did. At the end of their wild ride, they became parents.
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The Move to Germany and Adoption
In March 2009, Heidi and Eric left their California home for Landstuhl, Germany, after Eric, an engineering assistant for the 17th Air Force, was assigned to Ramstein Air Base.
After learning of their move to Germany, the couple created a blog called “The Adventures of Eric and Heidi” to keep friends current on their lives overseas. The couple updates the blog frequently, which has included stories and pictures of their move to Germany, their tour of local castles, Eric’s assignments around the world, and would soon include a story they wouldn’t have been able to make up if they tried.
In May 2009, they announced on their blog that they had decided to enter parenthood through adoption. Eric and Heidi had always planned on having a family consisting of biological and adopted children, but after their doctor performed a fertility assessment, they were told that their family would have to be built through adoption unless they tried infertility treatments.
For most couples, this news can be devastating. However, Eric and Heidi are not an ordinary couple.
“It took us about a half a second, literally, to decide,” Heidi said. “We kind of looked at each other, shrugged and said, “I don’t think so, but thank you.”
Eric and Heidi originally decided to adopt internationally and joined an adoption support group at Ramstein Air Base to further educate themselves. However, a few of the international adoptive parents told them stories that worried them: one family had to wait 18 months for their child, and another had to make eight trips to Guatemala and paid $57,000 to adopt theirs. Their stories, coupled with the difficulty of adopting internationally in Germany, led to the hopeful parents choosing domestic adoption.
A woman in the adoption support group referred Heidi to a Florida adoption agency, and she immediately called them. They told Heidi that they were not accepting any more adoptive families because their waiting list was so long, so she suggested that Heidi contact American Adoptions. Once again, Heidi quickly followed up on the referral, and she and Eric were soon active with the agency.
A Life-Changing Trip
In late September, Eric was assigned to work for a week in Spain, a country Heidi had always wanted to visit because of her work as a middle school Spanish teacher. It was always at the top of their list of countries to visit during their stay in Europe.
Then, the next thing Heidi knew, she was on a plane to Spain to meet Eric, who had surprised her by buying her a ticket to join him there. Eric and Heidi visited beautiful Spaniard beaches, palaces and cathedrals, ate seafood every night and had a much-needed, relaxing trip because of what October had in store for them.
After their final beachfront dinner at sundown, they drove back to the hotel, preparing for the next morning’s flight. They walked into their hotel room and saw that they had a missed call from American Adoptions’ Lara Sandusky. Heidi immediately called back, but American Adoptions had just closed for the day, so the couple had to wait until the next morning to find out the news. Even though they had been active for only two months, they figured it had to be important since the agency knew they were on vacation.
They were right.
The next day at the airport, Heidi was going through security without Eric when her phone rang.
“Do I need to be sitting down for this call?” she asked.
“Yes, you need to be sitting down with paper and a pencil,” Lara replied.
Heidi was told of a birth mother named Brittany in Baton Rouge, Louisiana who had selected her and Eric as parents to her baby daughter. She was due at the end of October.
The immense excitement Heidi felt at that instant had to be restrained, however, because she couldn’t tell anyone she knew until she told Eric. He wouldn’t be home until 1:30 a.m.
“I’m a pretty talkative person, but for those 12 hours or so, I hardly talked at all,” Heidi said. “I knew that if I started talking, my secret would burst out of me and there’s no way I was going to spoil the moment for Eric and I.”
When Heidi finally told her husband the news that night, the moment was undoubtedly worth the wait.
“It was the best news that I think I’ve ever received in my life,” Eric said.
Their adventure into adoption was just about to begin.
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Click the following to read the rest of Eric and Heidi’s adoption adventure.
