Hopefully all of my readers are aware of the fun giveaway I am holding for National Adoption Month thanks to Curls. If you haven't participated yet, please make sure you visit that post and leave a comment.

To participate in the giveaway I am asking readers to define adoption. As I have said, depending on your place in the adoption triad and your own personal experience with adoption, these personal definitions can vary greatly.

Originally I planned on sharing a post at the end of the month with my own personal definition of adoption, but as I have been giving this a lot of thought these past few days, I realized that I have way more to say than what I can fit in one nice, neat little post. I realized that I have lots of different ways that I could fill in the blank, "Adoption is.....".

I have practical answers, I have complicated answers and I have "feel good" answers. The truth is, adoption is a lot of different things to me. So I decided that I would start sharing my thoughts and feelings about what adoption is in several posts, and by the end of November, National Adoption Month, I will have a quite the definition of what adoption is to me.

I hope that you are giving it some thought this month as well (and make sure you share you thoughts and enter that giveaway).

I will start this thread with a practical definition of transracial adoption. Adoption is permanently uniting, as family, a child whose parents are deceased or otherwise unable to parent him, and parents who have the desire to add a child to their family. It is a way to build a family. Transracial adoption is an adoption in which the child is from a different race and/or culture and/or country, etc. than the adoptive parents.

This is a really "neat" definition adoption and in reality, adoption is much more complication, emotional and detailed than that definition lets on. So stay tuned for a great deal more of my definition of adoption.


*Photo from Liquid Library