#babyquest

[icemanzek]

Baby in the kitchen, what will they make

Tileset by LimeZu

[icemanzek]

Update: April 16, 222

It’s finally summer break for me, I really hope to finally finish Babyquest. Right now I’m exhausted from finals, but in a week or so when I’ll feel incomplete without something to do work on after copious amounts of studying, production is resuming👶

[Art by my friend Wakayrd, a commission for official game art!]

[etsyfindoftheday]

etsyfindoftheday | SUGGESTED SHOPS | 4.28.15

neon city herbal tea by babyquest

[bourbontobabies]

It’s done. Now we wait.

I turned in our home study packet and our fee. 

Now we wait. 

Two to six months for the home study to be complete. 

And then, THEN we can start looking for our baby! 

This is like the first “baby bump” picture for me. Were we pregnant this would be the first sonogram, the first little pooch picture. 

We’re far from being done and it’ll likely be a damn sight longer than 9 months, but we’re on the path now for real. 

It’s just money and time. 

(Speaking of which, we’re $65 shy of our first $1,000 in our fundraiser. If you’re into it, we’d love to celebrate today’s milestone with being 1/10 of the way towards our goal. If you can and want to donate, we’d love you for it.) 

[bourbontobabies]

I’ve been researching a lot of different options for funding adoption. We were denied for a personal loan through our bank. (Which was not surprising. We JUST financed a new car and my husband has only been at his new job for two months. We’re not a good credit risk right now. I get that.) So we need to start looking at other options for how we’re going to come up with the next chunk of money we’ll need after our home study is approved. It can take a few months for the home study to be approved, but a few months isn’t that long in the grand scheme of pulling 10k out of thin air. 

So anyway, I’m researching options. There are a lot of choices for families that identify as Christian and belong to a church. Not as many for those of us who don’t. 

But as I’m looking further I’m noticing another trend, aside from the Christian preference for many of them:

There is a heavy dose of white savior complex in a lot of the language on funding sites. “Saving children, building families” is the name of an organization. They talk about the “nobility and necessity of the goal” of adoption. There’s a lot of talk about “rescuing orphans” and being called by God to build their families through the miracle of orphan adoption on some of the other sites I’ve looked at. 

Which just reeks of white Christian families going into other countries and “rescuing” babies from cultures they don’t understand. Saving Children, Building Families focuses on international adoption and makes their decisions on who to fund primarily on the strength of the sob story involved apparently. 

Gross. 

But they’re speaking this way not just of actual orphans (children with no living parents) but also of children who were placed for adoption through an adoption plan. There’s just a lot of kind of gross assumptions being made about birth parents and their choice to place their children in general and as a prospective adoptive parent it squicks me out. 

I don’t want to rescue anyone. They’re not a chihuahua trapped in a cage with an unlicensed breeder. They’re babies. Actual human babies. With parents who likely love them so dearly that they want to make sure they can be given the best possible chances in life. That’s beautiful and heroic. 

As I’ve been looking at a lot of resources about adoption in general, from financial to emotional support, there’s a heavy leaning towards circle jerk back patting for adoptive parents. Coupled with a heavy dose of “save the poor babies!” bullshit rhetoric.

I feel like as we get farther into this process the more I’m seeing there is a need to help support other families like ours. I hope once we complete our adoption we’ll be in a place, emotionally and financially, to be able to offer that support to other people like us going through this. Families that are good people who just want to raise a family together. No higher power calling them, just the sincere desire to raise a baby. 

Maybe our little baby items shop or fundraising efforts will raise enough money to fund our adoption plus some extra to start a fund to pass on to other families moving forward. Who knows.