The alder trees along the coastline were just beginning to show a hint of autumn color when I took my daughter on her first ferry boat ride across Puget Sound. She held the railing, her sparse baby hair blowing in the salty breeze. We were traveling from our home on the peninsula to the big …Read More

Congratulations to Jill from Life at Killeny Glen! You’re our first Wild Olive Tees winner! Contact me at stefanie@wildolivetees.com and I’ll hook you up with the shirt of your choice. Thanks for playing, everyone! We’ll have another winner next week… And the next!

Amie and I are buds. We’ve partnered up on a few things, God-led things. One is No Hands But Ours, and the other is Wild Olive. Since she and I both have a passion for both, we came up with a way to combine the two… For the next five weeks, we’ll be giving away …Read More

During the time between our official application to the SN adoption program and our referral, I went through a lot of stress and angst. It isn’t that I suffered from doubt. Quite the opposite – if anything I was wildly over-confident, even cavalier in my certainty that we had made the right decision, in spite …Read More

Each Wednesday we post links from the previous week that touch on special needs adoption. Our hope is that these small snapshots provide you with a glimpse of life after adopting through China’s waiting child program… both the long-term blessings and the challenges that come with parenting a child with special needs. We also hope …Read More

Are we making adoption too hard? Too overwhelming? Too complicated? I make an effort to read as much as I can about adoption, specifically trans racial adoption. Being the mom of 4, almost 5, Chinese children, I think it’s part of my job description to be informed and aware. And I’ve been reading a lot …Read More

I knew I loved you last night when I was returning to bed, and found your legs dangling out of yours, half way to the floor, and scooped you up to move you back to your pillow and for a moment, watched you sleep in the glow of the streetlight peeking through our blinds. Or …Read More

I can still remember the first special needs checklist we ever filled out. It was March 2005. We had just sent our first dossier to China. Our checklist was quite simple. We stated cleft lip and palate, female and As Young As Possible (AYAP). My husband and I signed it and I quickly faxed it …Read More

Each Wednesday we post links from the previous week that touch on special needs adoption. Our hope is that these small snapshots provide you with a glimpse of life after adopting through China’s waiting child program… both the long-term blessings and the challenges that come with parenting a child with special needs. We also hope …Read More

I have been praying for over a week what God would have me share about our adoption of a sweet angel from China, who had been burned, neglected, and shunned because of her outward appearance … In the first moments of meeting our sweet daughter I could see the woundedness all over her face and …Read More