The interesting thing...

"Introduce yourself to the group and tell us one interesting fact about you."

My mind immediately mulls over the possible answers to share with strangers, new friends, and/or people I'm not super close with.  I reevaluate as others share theirs.  I could take the easy way out and use any number of things:

*I like to read (not surprising). 

*I attended graduate school in Hawai'i (exciting and cool, but it's been 13 years).
*I've worked at the library for 13 years ("but you don't look old enough"... why thank you. Hanging out with teenagers, in a freezing cold building, apparently take years off your face).

*I'm a Wyoming native (and so are a lot of other people in Wyoming).
*I have a blog... (that I don't write or focus on near enough)

*I'm crafty. I create my own planner/bullet journal/scrapbooks. I enjoy zentangle/doodling and hand lettering. I collect washi tape, pens, and stationary. 

But the answer I choose to give is one closer to my heart.

"After years of trying to start a family, my husband and I chose adoption.  We adopted all three of our kids; Two at birth and one from foster care."

Adoption is not only something interesting but something that is deeply meaningful. It has been ingrained in the narrative of my entire adult life. Creating our family through adoption wasn't the backup plan. It may have been the road we hadn't originally started to travel, but it's still the road we chose, the road we were led to, and the one we are happy we journeyed on.  From the beginning, our only goal was to be parents. We wanted babies to love and it didn't matter to us how that happened.

Honestly we could easily never again mention adoption as part of our story. I can't count the number of times people say they wouldn't have guessed since the kids look just like us.  Enough time has passed that our bonus child is no longer a surprise to people who thought we only had two.

But it's extremely important to us that our children know their story. As parents, we get to create and imprint the narrative in their hearts that will guide them throughout their lives. We share with them that adoption means they are special, blessed, and chosen.  We remind them how very much we wanted to be parents and how God chose each of them especially for us. We celebrate their adoption days so that they see adoption as a beautiful, unique, meaningful part of their life. We want them to be proud of the fact that they're adopted. We want them to know deep in their soul that they are each the very best thing that has happened to us.

We aren't naive enough to believe that they'll never have doubts about who they are, wondering whether they did something wrong or if they were unwanted. Or that at some point in the future, they'll hear someone use "you're adopted" as a hurtful retort. When that happens, we want our story, the one they can recite in their sleep, to be the one they can fall back on and trust in. We want them to proudly declare to the world that "yes, I am adopted".