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Our Family A few of the "middle kids" are missing in this photo, but it is hard to catch them all at once! Ü
After being blessed with 4 birth children, my husband and I started foster parenting newborns. Over the years the majority of our foster children were African American or Hispanic. So when we decided that we wanted to enlarge our family through adoption it just made sense to adopt an African American or Hispanic child. However, it was not as easy as we had hoped. At the time agencies would let us foster minority children indefinitely but they would not let us adopt and offer a child a permanent home? It took us almost 5 years to find an agency that would allow us to adopt transracially. In the meantime we moved to a larger home and were blessed with two more birth children. Once we finished adopting our first child, an African American son, we were told we were now considered a "multicultural" family. We were also told that we would not have any problems trying to adopt again in the future. This made no sense to us at all but we were not going to argue! They were correct. Ü Over the next ten years we were blessed to adopt 9 more children. We have a wonderfully diverse, multicultural family. Our children are all beautiful and their heritage is Caucasian, African American, Guatemalan and Vietnamese. When we searched to find items (clothing, books, toys, etc) that represented our diverse family, we found that there was a huge void in multicultural products. We were able to find a few books and even a few toys, but we could not find any clothing with designs featuring minority or multicultural children on them. We decided that if we wanted to have products that matched our multicultural family we were going to have to make them ourselves... and soon our company was born. Ü ------------------------------------------------------------------- One of our 16 children passed away from SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She was a delightful baby and is our very special little Angel. We were very blessed to have Zoie in our lives, even if it was for such a short time. We were devastated by her death and deeply saddened by our loss. We will always miss her, but we wouldn't trade the time we had with our beautiful daughter for anything. Zoie is our very special Angel Baby who watches over our family. Ü She is the reason we call our company, AngelBabyGifts
Please check out the SIDS web page to find out the best way to keep your child safe. ************************************************************ We have worked with numerous agencies and lawyers over the years, and have been blessed to be foster parents for two different agencies. Our first adoption was thru a private agency that no longer places transracially. Our second adoption was facilitated with the help of a private lawyer. The rest of our children joined our family with the help of one agency. We LOVED working with Adoption Link. They not only helped with our domestic adoptions, but they also did our home studies for our International adoptions. Adoption Link is located in Oak Park, IL. The agency works with families from all over the world to find loving homes for Black and biracial infants. They also do International home studies for families. Adoption Link has a "sister agency" called Chances by Choice. Chances by Choice is an agency that is dedicated to helping children who are born HIV positive. Many of these children convert to HIV negative. The agency provides international adoption, education and supportive services for children around the world who are HIV positive with no symptoms of AIDS, or who have sero-converted to HIV negative. Statistics show that 75 to 80% of children who test HIV positive at birth have only the birth mother's antibodies and not the virus itself. A sophisticated blood test called the PCR can now determine with a high degree of accuracy by 6 months of age whether an infant is antibody or antigen positive. http://www.chancesbychoice.org/ 1-708-524-1433 http://adoptionlinkillinois.com/about.php -------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank You for visiting us at AngelBabyGifts.com Fondly, the Kelley Family Ü ------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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