Little Bird

What is Twenty Birds?

Twenty Birds is a tiny, online business-in-the-making. My husband, Nick, and I thought it up one day last spring as we were searching for a way to celebrate our son’s first Adoption Day. We have a beautiful, handcrafted “Happy Birthday” fabric banner, and we thought it would be lovely to have a “Happy Adoption Day” banner for when we celebrate the day we became a family.

There are many creative and diverse adoption products stores online, and we decided to join this growing movement and source a wide-variety of handmade goods that celebrate adoption.

When will Twenty Birds open?

Our plans for opening the business were stalled this summer when Nick was deployed to Afghanistan. Ian and I are missing him a lot, but he’s doing well and we’re looking forward to being together again.

Twenty Birds will officially open in late 2011.

What kinds of items will I find at Twenty Birds?

As we start out, Twenty Birds will carry just a few lines of products: adoption announcements, greeting cards, adoption day banners, gifts for waiting mothers, wall art, notecards, and a few other things.

As we design new product lines and locate artisans to craft them, we will carry items that speak to and support everyone involved in adoption. This will include social workers, birth families, waiting families, friends of adoptive families, adoptees, families formed through international, foster, and domestic adoption…the list is long.

We will grow our business to celebrate adoption while keeping in mind that celebration doesn’t mean forgetting the grief, loss, and difficulties experienced by birth families, adoptees, and adoptive parents. In the future, we will provide adoption goods that speak to these difficult aspects of adoption. Because of the delicate nature of grief and loss, however, these products take even more time to design and develop than those that focus on the joys of adoption.

What is the Little Bird blog?

While our amazing designers at Aeolidia are working on the Twenty Birds website, the web address twentybirds.com will direct you to Little Bird Blog.

I started this blog as a way to process and share life events of all kinds–happy, sad, dramatic, mundane. The tagline “adoption & fertility; loss & joy” is both well chosen and misleading. While many of my posts center around adoption and fertility, the “loss & joy” can cover a wide range of topics. I find myself posting about love a lot. That’s my favorite topic, as you’ll see.

I invite you to join a conversation, start a conversation, or email me at twentybirdsblog@gmail.com. I would like Little Bird to be a public forum for reflections on the emotional, political, and ethical questions that surround adoption and fertility today. Little Bird will be an integral part of Twenty Birds. It is a project close to my heart.

How will you use the profits?

We’ve learned a lot from Muhanmad Yunus’s idea of social business. A social business has  a positive social objective as its goal.

In our model of social business, which we’ve formed using Yunus’s ideas as inspiration, 25% of our profits will go to low-income families who are adopting children at risk for special needs.

The remaining profits will go right back into the business and to our own adoption account, to fund our second adoption which is “in the works” right now.

Why Handmade?

Nick and I buy handmade as much as possible. We like supporting artisans who are trying to make ends meet outside the corporate economy. We think that handmade items are often of higher quality and more beautiful than mass produced items. And we like using and giving and handling things that were made with care by an artisan invested in his or her work. It feels better to us. We like teaching our son about the importance and beauty of objects that have a human history.

Twenty Birds will occasionally carry a mass produced item if we fall in love with one and can’t, because of cost restrictions, provide a handmade version until a later date.

Why did we name the business Twenty Birds? Why is the blog named Little Bird?

Find out here.