Each adoption is a unique event for the people who are personally involved, or for those who feel connected to the parents-to-be. The adoption period takes you to a new world and can wear you down emotionally if you are not prepared for what can be expected. It is not the regular pregnancy with which some people like to compare it. It is a pregnancy between cold bureaucracy on one side and the daily feelings of vulnerable tenderness on the other. Many books have been written about the ins and outs of pregnancies but there was never a book to prepare oneself for that very special time we call adoption. Geeri Bakker takes you there with her positive attitude and her sense of humor. She takes you along the unpredictable, uncomfortable and sometimes seemingly endless path that is the adoption procedure. THE ADOPTION HANDBOOK teaches adoptive parents-to-be how to face stress in its many appearances during the sometimes dark and winding road that leads to their adoptive child. To illustrate the book, Geeri Bakker shares her own story of the procedures that she and her husband endured when adopting their two children. It is not the (Dutch) procedure that makes this story so touching and at times breathtaking. It is the way that stress burrows into hearts that desperately wish to adopt a child; something that anyone going through an adoption procedure will recognize. THE ADOPTION HANDBOOK helps adoptive parents acknowledge their feelings of stress during their long-term 'pregnancy' and deal with them: facing the main goal, and feeling energetically able, both physically and mentally, to 'conceive' their child when the time is right. It is only normal that pregnant couples gather information to prepare themselves. So now it is time that adoptive parents prepare themselves, as well. For the well-being of this special child, given to you to have, hold, love, cherish, and to let it grow and grow up in your family.