It was in 2005 when I chanced upon the websites of adorable looking orphans in China. Not only were there stories of their sad lives but there were pictures of the little children as well. Some of them were abandoned because they were born with certain defects and many were simply left in the streets just because they were born a girl!

The mere sight of these helpless and cute little babies was enough to bring tears to my eyes. In fact, the video clip that I’ve included above is one of those that had made me cry when I watched it. Actually, I will still cry when I watch that clip.

Anyway, as if by magic, I found myself returning to the different websites put up by the orphanages every night. Not only that, I started to search for other adoption stories written by adoptive parents from all around the world and found that there are actually many of such abandoned children among us. At that time, I was already married for almost 6 years but we were still childless. We love children very much, so we decided to consult a doctor and his conclusion was that there was nothing wrong with us but there were other external issues affecting our ability to conceive.

I decided to bring up the idea of adopting a baby to my spouse. After showing him and various sites and many more weeks of discussion, I finally managed to convince him to start a family by adoption. I thought the next hurdle would be to drop the bomb on my mother-in-law. Surprisingly, she was in full support of our decision! I felt as if our prayers had been answered!

Since we had made up our mind and were all set to go into adopting a baby, we started doing some research on the adoption process. The process and laws governing the process of adopting children are different in different countries, so it is important to read up books on the general rules as well as to surf the websites of our local government for more specific rules.

To cut a long story short, what we did was we spent several days filling up and sending in a very long application form to the government ministry handling this issue (you really have to fill up many pages of the application form and you have to be careful not to make any mistake as it could jeopardize your chances of success). After that, we had to go through a home study whereby an appointed social worker would do two interviews with us; once in her office and the second in our home.

To be continued in the next post …

To find out how you can get a FREE Report that will prevent you from getting scammed of your money, time and love when you are adopting a baby, log on to http://www.adoptingababyguide.com