So why this blog? My name is Yassmin and I live in Jordan with my husband and two daughters. I am originally from Gaza, but carry the US passport. My husband is from Oklahoma. So we are essentially expats living in Jordan. We have two daughters, a feisty 3 year old, and a 6 month old who prefers sweet potato over apple sauce (yes babies have preferences too). We don’t have any pets, though trying to keep our plants alive takes a lot of effort.

I know some people say that adoption is their calling, and I never knew this was a thing. But I think all those who have wanted to adopt know it was just something that they believed was meant for them. And that’s how I’ve always felt – the desire to mother a parent-less child, who did not have the love that we had so much to give. With motherhood this feeling grew stronger, that your heart is in fact large enough to love more than your own. That was the easy part.

The hard part was to figure out how to adopt a child in a country where adoption doesn’t exist – where the law does not permit it. And then there was my husband (that’s saved for another post). 

So as we research this – adoption, kafala, fostering, guardianship, whatever we call it, and at the same time, figure out how to get the child to live with us in the US, we wanted to document it and share our experience for others. So that maybe it will help someone navigate their own adoption journey as we navigate ours. So here is our story…