MEANT TO BE: THE NIEMIS’ ADOPTION JOURNEY
Published January 2014 By The Cradle Staff A family sits around a picnic table at the zoo. There are older members and younger members, Asian members and Caucasian members. Everyone talks and laughs as they pass the baby around. It’s a happy picture, but one question immediately comes to mind: what brought all of these […]
JUMPING FOR JOIE – MEREDITH, RENEE, AND JOIE’S STORY
Published October 2014 By Shelbie Bostedt, Intern At first glance, Renee and Meredith seem like any ordinary pair of Facebook friends. But at the heart of this relationship is something much deeper than a social network. Renee is the birth mother of Meredith’s daughter, Joie, who was adopted through The Cradle six years ago. After losing […]
JEAN’S ADOPTION STORY
I gave birth to Laura Helen in 1951. At the time, I was an unwed, college-aged woman, and parenting my child just wouldn’t have been accepted. Open adoption wasn’t an option yet either. After I placed her, I thought I’d be intruding if I tried to find her too soon. So I just went about […]
A CROSS CONTINENT ADOPTION REUNION
On November 1st, 2005, I will be flying across the Atlantic to England to meet my birth sister for the very first time. At the age of 55, I decided to keep a promise that I made to myself years ago — to look for my birth mother. I felt there might still be a […]
MEET FR. WOODBURY: CRADLE BABY AND CRADLE DAD
Published January 2015 By The Cradle Staff Father Bob Woodbury knows adoption from two perspectives. A retired Episcopal priest, Fr. Woodbury was adopted through The Cradle in 1941. Thirty nine years later, he became an adoptive parent when he brought his second daughter, Joanna, home from The Cradle in December 1979. “It was December 12 […]
THE HJERPES’ HAPPY ENDING
Published September 2013 By The Cradle Staff Teresa Hjerpe had known from the beginning that one day, she would adopt a child. “It was always in my heart,” she said. But she thought that adoption would be a way to add to the family she and her husband had already begun. After discovering she was […]
