Get your running shoes on! Time to get going!

After our first orientation at the end of November we got assigned to a wonderful social worker and the process started! We realized why people call it “paper pregnant.” Man alive….. they want all the info they can get on you and maybe your first born 🙂 It’s a good thing though and we happily accepted the massive folders of paperwork. We had our first home study the week before Christmas and our social worker came to see our home and talk more with us and the girls. She brought more paperwork, if that’s even possible! 🙂 We got an appointment to have our fingerprints taken and those are sent to Lansing where they also perform background checks on us. This process takes a little while we’re told so we’re waiting a few weeks to get the green light there 🙂 We are working on all our paperwork and setting up medical appointments and well checks and cracking open the safe to get copies of all the important documents we have. We’re giving our life history and telling them why we want to do this. We’re getting references and driving records and everything else you can imagine 🙂 We are also starting to get his room ready. The girls share a bedroom and we used our third bedroom as a playroom but we moved all toys to the basement so we can begin to get his room set. It sits empty right now and I find myself walking by and stopping so often to just stand in there and look around. I imagine where his crib/bed will be, where I’ll rock him when he’s tired, upset, scared or just wants me. I imagine where we’ll sit on the floor and what books I’ll read to him. We already got a special book about adoption as a Christmas gift from his Nana and Papa 🙂 The only reason I cried on Christmas, happy tears 🙂 I wonder what clothes we’ll dress him in. Will he be an infant? Or will he be 3 years old? What will he look like? What will his name be or what will we name him? I have questions that fill my head and my heart beats faster thinking about him and wanting him, wishing he were already here, home. He won’t grow inside of my stomach but he has grown in our hearts. God created him to be a part of our family, to be our son, he will be born to someone else but he was created to be mine. My mind can go crazy wondering where he is right now. Is he safe? Is he loved? Is he being fed, rocked to sleep, sung to, played with? My heart breaks knowing the answer. It’s why he’ll be brought to us. Adoption is a beautiful thing but it’s born out of brokenness. This gamut of emotions is not lost on us. We’ve been thinking and praying over all these things for so long and feel like we just got on the fast track and the time is almost here for him to come home. I can’t wait for the moment we get the call that we have a child who matches our profile and he can come home. I don’t know if I’ll be able to let go of him once he’s finally in my arms ❤

Here we go…

Well, here goes! My first blog! We decided to write about our journey adopting through foster care. It will help friends and family stay updated and will be neat to look back on this some day and share with our little guy 🙂 We always discussed adoption when we first got married and knew it was something we were interested in doing. But always seemed far off and almost unreal. We had two beautiful girls who keep us busy and fill our lives with laughter, fun and learning in parenting 🙂 As all kids do! Both pregnancies and deliveries were difficult to say the least and my Dr. recommended that I not have more children because they said I wasn’t build for having kids. We planned to have 4-5 kids and my dreams of a full house of kids shattered. I felt like I was grieving what I couldn’t have and always dreamed of having and assumed I could and would have. I felt so many emotions, anger, sadness, confusion (why did God give me a mother’s heart if He didn’t give me a body to grow babies?!) guilt (I have two beautiful, healthy kids, some women don’t have any) and a loss for the kids I would never get to carry. I felt a little bitter and have to take some time to process this and be able to come to terms with it. Zach (my husband) brought up the idea of adoption and I felt God placing this seed in my heart and for a long time I fought it and wouldn’t allow it to grow. It sounds bad to admit that I ignored God for so long when He was calling us to something, but I am human and though I ignored for a while, I eventually said yes 🙂 We decided almost two years ago that we would adopt and we felt called to adopt through foster care and we prayed and prayed about the timing and all other aspects of this, and believe me there are a lot! We knew we would go through Samaritas. A billboard with a beautiful girl called to me for so long and I would avoid looking at it each day as I passed it. I’m hard headed sometimes 🙂 We knew that’s where God was calling us. I made a wonderful friend who happened to work at the very same company, a neat little “coincidence.” We started meeting people who adopted via foster care or private adoption, we also learned of a new group at our church for foster/adoptive moms. None of this surprised me but it also surprised me 🙂 God was beginning to prepare us for this journey. We started praying about the gender, age and race of our child. In my mind, I knew a little girl would fit perfectly in our family, I’m a girl mom! I know how to raise little girls and I love it 🙂 God seemed to have different plans than me 🙂 After praying for a long time we knew God was calling us to a little boy and we knew we’d officially begin this process December of 2018 (this month) and that he would be younger than Paige. We felt that keeping the kids in birth order would be best for us. We got a blank notebook and started to journal and write to our little one. We’d write prayers, when we felt God nudging us to pray for him, we let the girls write notes or letters to him in there. Hopefully it’ll be a special gift some day and he’ll see that we were waiting and praying for him for so long. For this sweet piece in our family puzzle. We had our first orientation meeting at the end of November and got connected with a FANTASTIC social worker, we love her 🙂 We have support from other areas to help us through all the paperwork and process of this. We feel so blessed and surrounded by love and support and we can see God preparing us and our girls for this exciting adventure!