How To Adopt A Relative Child From Mexico

hi, i’m fiona shanahan and this is my husband, grant. we have three children: patrick is 6, kathlyn is 14 months and jimmy is 4 weeks old. kathlyn, our middle daughter, has downs syndrome and congenital heart issues,

How To Adopt A Relative Child From Mexico, so i guess we are parents of a child with special needs. [grant] we had a bit of trouble having patrick. fiona got hyperemesis so she was in hospital a lot of the pregnancy. [fiona] i went into kidney and liver failure

so i was told it was not advisable to have any more children. we went into the adoption process to add to our family, to give patrick a sibling. and we never said that we had to have the perfect child. so, for me, i feel that when kathlyn’s birth parents picked us, that we were meant to be her parents from then on. [grant] yeah, i was very scared about adopting a child with downs syndrome because i had no idea what it meant. we went around and visited a few familiesand of them in particular

was a couple that had adopted a downs syndrome child. it was great to meet them because they had a very relative, relevant experience. [fiona] for kathlyn, she had really quite a few medical issues. so her heart, she had lots of heart issues and so she was fed by a nasal-gastric tube,because she couldn’t feed. we were just starting to set back into routine and i found out i was pregnant and - humongous shock, i think. i was really ill and i was vomiting 20 to 30 times a day

and all i wanted to do was to care for the children i had and i couldn’t, and so that for me was devastating. [grant] from the day we found out for sure fiona was pregnant, there was no way fiona could look after the children. [fiona] for us, tossing up between grant leaving work or or us paying someone to do it and not making ends meet. and that’s when the agencies stepped inand said we might be able to help out. i found it difficult to ask for help. we chose to adopt kathlyn and

she is part of our family and then to turn around and say we need someone to help us out we need someone to come and give us a hand this is getting to much - and then getting pregnant and saying we need help for both our children, just so we can carry the third child - i found that really hard. [grant] i guess to talk to people in the industry is important and to try and find anyone who's had similar sort of experiences. [fiona] ask for help.

and it is there, don't feel ashamed. kathlyn is kathlyn first. she's our daughter,she's part of our family. she's got some amazing qualities. she can be a madam, she's very strong willed and she's also really gentle and compassionate and kathlyn is who she is. her down syndrome and other medical issuesis a part of her, it's who she is. and though it was really hard work to get to this point, we're really lucky, we've got three very

healthy happy children. we're just starting to be a family again. aren't we?[grant] yeah it's really good actually. she's certainly her own personality, we love her to bits. there's no way we'd let anyone take her off us. [fiona] no way!