Our Adoption Story

Hi! We are Eric and Sarah Clevenger. We have been together for just over 11 years and married since 2007.  We met during Sarah’s freshman year of college at Ball State University.  Sarah was studying Apparel Design and Eric was studying Philosophy.  Initially, we were just friends, but quickly realized there was something else there.  We became engaged after just over a year of dating.  We then remained engaged until Sarah finished school in 2006 and we moved to the Chicago suburbs with two of our closest friends.  You’ll meet them later.

We have never really done anything the traditional way, whatever that is.  Being just out of school and moving to a new city with little money we decided to elope!  It was the most amazing decision.  Sarah made her dress and veil.  We went to downtown Chicago with our two friends in tow as our “witnesses”.  We will never forget that day.  After the ceremony we went to eat a delicious meal at Weber Grill, then proceeded to go to the Museum of Science and Industry.  While at the museum we noticed that they were preparing to hold a wedding ceremony.  Everyone that worked there would stop us and ask if we were the couple getting married there.

We stayed in the Chicago area for just under two years before moving back to Indiana.  It was fun while it lasted but we knew it was time to settle down, so we moved back to Eric’s hometown to be near his family.  We haven’t regretted it one minute.  We know that we have a wonderful support system here and this is where we want to raise our children.  We purchased our first house in 2010 and have been hard at work to turn it into our family home ever since.

We have always known that we wanted to have a family someday thinking that, like most people, when the time was right we would just get pregnant.  Some things just don’t always work out the way you had thought they would and this was one of them for us.  After four years of trying to get pregnant, and no luck, we were faced with a decision. We could either pay, out of pocket, for infertility treatments with no guarantee they would work or we could adopt and be guaranteed to end up with our child. Now both options would cost us roughly the same amount of money. The decision was not a hard one to make. We had always talked about wanting to adopt at some point, so it was easy to see the path we should be on.

After making that initial decision, then came the task of finding the right agency. That actually also came pretty easy. We talked to several people about the pros and cons of an open adoption vs. closed adoption, overseas adoption vs. domestic adoption. In the end we have decided to do a domestic open adoption through Independent Adoption Center (IAC). Everything about this non-profit organization is exactly what we were looking for. There will be more to come on how we reached these decisions in later posts.

We want to use this blog as a way to document our adoption journey for ourselves, our family and our future children.  We are starting at the very beginning right now.  We know that there will be a lot of waiting in our future and we want to share our story with others that may be going through the same process.  Along the way we will introduce you to our families and friends.  Sarah will be the one doing most, if not all, of the blogging from here on.  You can read more about how much it costs to adopt and why we are doing different fundraisers in this post.