Our Greatest Adventure Ever

Happy New Year, friends and family!  We thought that we’d take this day to share some exciting news with you.  We’ve recently begun our greatest adventure ever… we’re adopting!

This post has been a long time coming and I’m soooo excited to finally share some happy news about growing our family.  Adoption has been on our hearts for a long time, since before we were married.  I first became intrigued about adoption when I was a teenager and heard Steven Curtis Chapman talk about adopting from China.  After hearing about his adoptions, I vowed that I would adopt someday, probably after I gave birth to a few children.  Since before we were married, Gregory and I agreed that we both wanted to adopt, but we expected that we would be doing so later in life, probably after having three biological children.  I always wanted four children and thought that conceiving three and adopting a fourth would be the ideal family structure for us.  As the old verbiage goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.

The conversation of adopting came up again about a year and a half into our struggle with infertility.  My dad and step-mom had become foster parents.  Watching them love and care for children in need, who were not biologically theirs, pulled on our heart strings and opened our eyes and minds to what family really means.  Around the same time, Mike and Christina, close friends of ours, began their adoption process.  It was a great experience for us to have a little lens into their world and to get a taste for what was all involved.  But still, we weren’t ready to adopt.  We continued to seek doctors and treatments for our fertility struggles, and continued to have our hearts broken month after month.

A few months later, I watched the below video.  I immediately sent it to Gregory, and to Christina, my friend who was adopting.  It WRECKED me.  I couldn’t stop crying and was in awe of the beauty of the story, of the beauty of God’s love on display through adoption.  After a while, Christina responded to me and said she watched it with her husband, who said that the story reminded him of myself and Gregory.  That he knew we were meant to adopt.  Those words sparked something in my heart, in my soul.  But still, I didn’t feel ready.

Time went on and we continued down the fertility road.  I started working with a new doctor that gave me hope that we may be able to conceive.  I ended up having surgery, a laparoscopy to diagnose and clean-up endometriosis, as well as an ovarian wedge resection, which was supposed to help me ovulate.  And yet, I was still unable to ovulate on my own.  We went through many monitored rounds of fertility treatments, with many ultrasounds, and yet we received no good news.

It was crushing, not only emotionally but physically.  The fertility medications brought about fast weight gain, insane mood swings, intense hot flashes and debilitating headaches.  I began to feel like my body was no longer my own.  As much as I wanted to conceive a child, I was just so darn sick of trying.  And my body needed rest.  And soon the adoption conversation came up again.

We began to ask ourselves, why are we waiting to adopt?  We know that we want to adopt, we believe God has shown us that HE wants us to adopt, the strong desire that we have to become parents isn’t going away, despite us not being able to conceive… So what’s holding us back?

Fear.

Doubt.

(Lack of) Money.

All things that we had seen our Mighty God conquer in our lives multiple times.  So eight months ago, we jumped in with both feet.  Since then, we’ve filled out a lot of paper work, learned a lot about adoption and have begun telling those closest to us about this new journey.  Now that we are starting the ominous home study, and feel in need of prayer support and encouragement from those around us more than ever, we decided it was time to share with the world!

To answer a few big questions, we are pursuing a domestic adoption with a local Minnesota agency, and we don’t have a preference of gender or race.  We are hoping for an open adoption.  Most adoption professionals at this time advocate for open adoptions, as it seems to be what is best for the adoption triad (birth family, adoptive family and child).  The level of openness could lie anywhere between sending photos once a year to having regular in-person visits, but regardless, we want our child to know where they came from.  Our agency only does infant adoptions, so we may get matched with a birth mother who is only a few months pregnant, or who is about to give birth or who has already given birth!  But regardless, our child will be placed in our home while they are still an infant, which is important to us, since we’ll be first time parents and want to learn and experience every age and milestone with our child.

And the big one… yes, adoption is very expensive.  But no, we are not buying a baby.  Adoption fees cover the cost of legal fees as well as the program service, home study, birth parent services, placement services, post-placement services and post-adoption services.  That said, our adoption will cost between $18,000 and $20,000.  Those are scary numbers for most anyone, let alone two twenty-somethings who have already spent a lot of money in fertility treatments.  But we are called by and serve a big God, and we are trusting that He will provide what we need.

We would like to invite you into our adoption journey.  We hope you will see yourself as part of the community that we hope to build around our child as he/she grows up.  It takes a village to raise a child, and, at least in our case, it also takes a village to bring a child home.

If you feel led to support our adoption journey financially, you can click the image below to view our AdoptTogether page.  AdoptTogether is a non-profit, crowdfunding platform that bridges the gap between families who want to adopt and the children who need loving homes.  By going through AdoptTogether, instead of other crowdfunding sites, your contribution is tax deductible and specifically goes towards our adoption fees.

More than anything, we ask that if you are a praying person, please pray for us, for our child, and for the birth family of our child.  Adoption is not an easy journey and there’s so much more to come.  We specifically ask for prayer in the following areas:

1. That our hearts and our home would be prepared for a child
2. That God would provide the necessary funds for our adoption fees
3. That our home study goes smoothly
4. That our child’s birth parents would receive support and love from their friends and family
5. That our child’s birth parents would know how loved and valued they are
6. That there would be supernatural bonding between us and our child
7. That our child’s birth parents would desire an ongoing relationship with us and our child

So that’s that!  We’ll certainly be sharing more here as we continue on this journey.  In the mean time, you can check out the Adopt page that is linked at the top of this site for more pages and information.  Thank you for taking the time to read this and for supporting us!  Your love and support means more than we could ever convey.

“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
 See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.”

Isaiah 43:18-19

I also want to note, that while this is an exciting time for our family and we truly believe adoption is a wonderful, amazing privilege, we know that it isn’t made possible without loss.  I can’t fathom the heartache, pain and loss that is on the other side of this announcement.  As we prepare to bring a child home, this quote from Jody Landers is constantly on my mind: “A child born to another woman calls me mommy.  The magnitude of that tragedy & the depth of that privilege are not lost on me.”

It's only fair to share...