In part two of my initial two "mini-sodes" to kick off this podcast, I interview my husband and best friend, Joe Fulginiti.

Joe and I already knew we hit the lottery with our relationship. When we began to struggle with fertility challenges, health issues and carrying a pregnancy, we wondered if we could just be happy being child-free. We did a lot of soul-searching and figured out we still wanted kids. That set us off on a quest for how to do that. We researched many different avenues for starting a family and eventually arrived at the one thing we didn't want to do originally: foster-to-adopt. After so much loss, we were very afraid of getting hurt more, putting all our love, attention and energy into a relationship that could be "taken away". Eventually we figured out the mindset we needed to cultivate and maintain to successfully take the journey, regardless of whatever happened in the end. We learned that what we wanted was secondary, and that our job was to support the child

In this episode, we share our story, we talk about mindset and how it evolved, challenges and coping strategies within the foster-to-adopt paradigm, and how lucky and grateful we are to have two amazing children. We briefly discuss neurodiversity, as our daughter is on the Autism spectrum.