Registration

We talked to our adoption agency this week and they let us know that we are a good 6 months away from being able to travel to Africa to go pick up our baby. Six months is on the good side of the spectrum, there are any number of delays that could occur and prolong our adoption process. However, while we recognize that these delays are possible, we pray against them and we pray for a smooth and speedy adoption process.

Because we are six months out from being able to travel to Africa, our agency advised me to go ahead and register for a full load this semester. If you don't know already, I am a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I am pursuing a masters degree and I'm am trying to get in as many hours as possible before we get the baby. So, I registered for classes tonight and now we owe the seminary a bunch of money. Ugh! I'm trying not to freak out about the amount of money that we owe and the number of hours that I am taking, but I know that God has called me to take classes at the seminary and to pursue the adoption.

Being in grad school and pursuing an adoption are two major events in life by themselves, let alone doing them at the same time. However, I know that I am doing what the Lord has led me to do right now. Praise the Lord that I don't face these things alone. God has given me a wonderful husband who helps and encourages me every step of the way. There are some days that I know that I wouldn't have been able to make it through the day without Matt. I also have awesome family and friends who support and encourage us. Our families have encouraged us through every step of the adoption and they are so excited to see the ways that God is working in our lives.

We are so excited that Thanksgiving is this week and we have a lot to be thankful for this year. I am so thankful for my husband and our family and friends who are so encouraging to us. I'm still a little shocked that Thanksgiving is this week, but I'm so grateful for some time off and getting to spend that time with Matt and our families.

Now what?

So, in the last couple posts I've explained all the background story for all the decisions that we have made regarding the adoption and how the Lord has led us to this decision. So now, I want to get you updated on all the steps that we gone through up until this point. We have been accepted to an adoption agency, and finished our home study. We meet several times with our social worker while we were doing our home study. I was really anxious about the home study process, but once we met our social worker, she put me at ease almost immediately. I really didn't have anything to worry about with regards to the home study. Looking back now I wonder what all my fretting was about. Now that our home study is competed we are waiting to get approval from immigration.

When adopting a child international you have to get approval to bring a child back into the United States. That is where we are now. We can't do anything else without this approval, so we are in a waiting stage right now. We have heard that this process could take up to 3 months. It's been a month already and we haven't heard anything, so we are continuing our wait.

Please continue to pray for us as we are waiting to hear back from immigration. Please pray that we would be patient as we wait. Please pray that as we wait we continue to rest in the Lord and continue to grow in our relationships with the Lord.

Please pray for our baby or babies that God would protect them and provide for them while we are separated. Please pray that the Lord would provide someone to hold our babies, until we can hold them. Please pray that the Lord would provide food for our babies, until we are able to feed them. These are some of the things that Matt and I pray for everyday and we will continue to pray for these things until we can be with our baby or babies.

How we chose our agency and country

The decision to adopt came quickly for us. God knew his divine plan for us but the opportunity came suddenly for us, and we were not expecting the opportunity to come in the way, and at the time that it did. Don't hear me wrong, we are really excited about the opportunity to adopt but the way that it came about was just a shock.

We had not really done any research on adoption agencies before this point. We made the decision to start the adoption process and then we had to decide what agency we were going to use. Some people know the country that they want to adopt from and they chose their agency based on the country that they want to adopt from. We had no idea where we wanted to adopt from. We decided that we wanted to approach all the decisions about the adoption prayerfully. We made the decision that we wanted to chose an agency that we trusted. We put a lot of time and prayer into the decision of what agency to use, we talked to friends of ours that had adopted to see what agencies they used and the experience that they had with those agencies.

After a lot of research and prayer we decided to use Lifeline Children's Services in Birmingham, AL. Once we chose an agency we started praying through all the countries that were available for us to adopt from through Lifeline, including both international and domestic adoption. We both felt very clearly that God was leading us to adopt internationally at this time. We are not ruling out domestic adoption for the future but we just felt very clearly about the decision to adopt internationally right now.

Lifeline had a list of countries that you can adopt from through their agency. We started praying about each one of those countries and looking at the requirements to adopt from those countries. Each country has it's own requirements for adoption in that country. When we read the requirements for Uganda, Africa we fit each requirement. As we read about Uganda and prayed about adopting from Uganda, we were both filled with such peace. We knew right then that we were supposed to adopt a baby from Uganda. The age range for our adoption is 3 months old to 2 years old. So, our baby will fall in that age range somewhere.

We sent in our application to Lifeline and a few days later we got our acceptance letter via email. Matt and I had run an errand to TJ Maxx and we were standing in the checkout line, when we got the email. Matt read it to me as we were waiting in line and we had our own public moment of rejoicing and praising God for His blessings. We were able to pay for our items and get out to the car before I lost it. I just sat in the car and cried because I was so happy.

I told Matt, "This has got to be what it is like to find out your pregnant. I don't even know this child, I don't know if they are a boy or a girl, I don't know what their personality is like, I don't know anything about this person, but I'm already in love with this child!" We know that God already has a child picked out for us and we know that one day soon we will get to meet this child.

Sorry this post is so long, but I am trying hard to get our blog up to date. Thanks for bearing with me as I'm trying to explain our thought process and decisions that we have made up to this point. God has bless us so much through this whole process and we want to be able to share that with others, so that they can see how good God is.

Our Adoption Story

Our story of adoption really starts when Matt and I were dating. Adoption was something that we talked about once we realized that our relationship was heading towards marriage. We both talked about that we had an interest in adoption and that it could be a possibility of how we would grow a family.

After we had been married for a couple years, we decided that we wanted to go ahead and try to start a family. We wanted to start early because we knew that we may struggle getting pregnant. So we started trying to have a baby. After about a year with no results we went to see a doctor. After several doctors appointments and tests, I started fertility drugs. We were on the fertility drugs for about 6 months with no results. My doctor decided that he had done all that he could do and that we needed to go see a specialist. The closest fertility specialist to us was in Mobile, AL. So we traveled over to meet with the doctor and discuss our possibilities.

After Matt and I left that meeting we decided that we had a lot of decisions to make. We struggled with all the possibilities and knew that we had to draw the line somewhere. We could spend all of our time and money spent persuing fertility treatments, if we wanted to. Also, we could put all of our resources into getting pregnant and God may not ever bless us with a child. After spending a lot of time in prayer and discussing the options we decided that we needed to take a break for a while.

After several months of taking a break from all the fertility drugs and treatments, Matt and I felt really at peace with our decision and we were also starting to come around to the idea that we may never have a biological child. During all of these years of decisions and struggles adoption was always a topic of conversation. We would talk about adoption and if we felt as if God was calling us to adopt a child during this time. We never felt at peace about pursuing adoption at that time. I started to pray more consistently about adoption. I prayed that God would help us see when the time was right and that He would provide the finances for an adoption. We knew that the finances would be an issue for us, but I prayed that God would show us areas in our personal budget that we could cut back on to raise money for an adoption, I prayed that God would give me ideas of how to raise money, and I prayed that He would provide the finances.

God heard my prayers and He provided the funds for our adoption. God provided the funds in such a way that it was a complete shock to us. We took some time to pray about the decision to start the adoption process. We felt very clearly during this time that God was telling us the start the process.

God has blessed us tremendously during this whole time of struggle and decisions. We know that we are doing exactly what God had lead us to do during this time. We are taking the whole process one step at a time and we are trying to be patient while everything is being worked out according to God's plan.

Update

We have had a lot going in the last few months. Well, really since May. I feel like we have been going non-stop since the end of May. We spent most of our summer traveling to see family and making preparations for the next school year. We really had a good summer and got to spend lots of time with family.

We also made some major changes to the BSU building at the Perk campus, which included lots of painting, removing wall paper, and redecorating. It was a lot of work and all of our free time in the summer went to the work that needed to be done at the building. I am so glad that all the work is done and I'm never taking wall paper down again! I didn't realize removing wallpaper is tough work!

We also made a big announcement this summer. We are adopting a baby! It's been a while since we first made our announcement, but I wanted to update our blog and be able to tell more of the details on here. We are really excited and looking forward to day that we get to meet our baby.

We took family pictures this summer and this is one of the pictures that we are able to take.

Just a heads up, you may see this picture on a christmas card too. So here are some of the details that we know. I'll share more about our story in later posts but for now I'll just share some of the major details that we know. We are adopting from Uganda. We have not specified wether we would like a boy or a girl. My thought process behind this was that you don't get to choose when you are pregnant, so why should I get to choose. We will be fine either way. We know that God already knows who our child is and we will get to meet him or her very soon. We have requested the age range of 3 months old to 2 years old. Our agency has given us a timeline of 9 to 15 months, but we know that any numbers of things could prolong our timeline. So, we are just praying that God protects us from those delays.

This is just some of the major things that happened this summer and I will be sharing more about our story at a later time. Check back in the next few days to read more about our story and where we feel like God is leading us.