Our journey to adoption

Today, I'm working on my daughter's high school graduation scrapbook. I'm putting together a "through the years" scrapbook--each page dedicated to a year in her life. I am NOT creative, so this is very painful--a labor of love!! Anyway, I'm taking a break from that, so thought I'd write a post about how this family of six decided to add two more.....

I'll try to keep it somewhat short. After our third child was born, we thought our family was complete. 5-6 years later, we decided we wanted to have another child. After a long time of not being able to conceive, we pursued domestic adoption. We were selected by a mother to adopt her child, but she later decided to keep her baby. Then...we found out I was pregnant. We were very excited until the 5th month when a heartbeat could not be found. A sonogram confirmed that our baby was not alive. Our sweet daughter Natalie came into the world on April 24, 2004, but her soul was already cuddling with Jesus. One year later, God blessed us with our little Emma. Then, once again, we thought our family was complete. When Emma was two, I felt a tug at my heart to adopt an older child, since we have a 9 year span between our two youngest anyway. I mentioned this to my husband who gave me the "you're crazy and you're scaring me" look! I said, "Okay, maybe it wasn't God talking to me." About a month later, a friend of ours spoke in church about adoption--from Ethiopia, in particular. He challenged our community to do more to help the orphans. Slowly, John's heart started to open up to the idea of adding to our family. We met with these friends about the process and began pursuing the adoption in Dec 2007/Jan 2008. Some other friends of ours mentioned that its harder to place older siblings, hint..hint! I laughed and said, "Then you need to pray that God will work on John's heart again"----and HE DID!! God is incredible!! Now John is equally as excited as I am to bring our daughters home.

Now we are awaiting a court date to adopt 2 beautiful girls from Ethiopia. I am thankful to God, my husband, Gladney Center for Adoption, the Ethiopian government who opened their doors for us to adopt, and the mother of our future daughters who loved them enough to let them go!