our baby's birthmother

today my heart as been very full thinking of our child's birth mother. i know how anxious i am for our baby to come but i'm sure she is just as anxious for the situation to take it's precious time. see from her perspective she is choosing an adoption plan for her child. meaning she will make a decision not to parent. i can't even imagine. how do you make that decision. then how do you decide who is good enough to raise your child. do you want someone like you? someone not like you at all? someone young? someone old? so many factors.

and she isn't taking the easy road. no, i'm sure it would have been easier not to choose life for this child that was unplanned. but she CHOSE LIFE!!!!! how awesome is that. God spoke to her that he had a plan for this child and she obeyed. she chose life for her precious unknown child. she has no idea what he will turn out to be or what family he will become a part of but she has the hope that it is better. better than any other decision she could have made. that takes courage.

who knows what this woman is going through right now. is she just a girl? is she doing this on her own? is she surrounded by a loving family? is she staying healthy? is she completely lost? is she taking care of my baby that's inside her? well just like God spoke to her to choose life for her baby and that he had a plan he is telling me that he has chose life for my baby and he has a plan. i have no idea where my child is or what his conditions are but i trust God who spoke life into him to not stop until it is complete.

so my heart is breaking for this mom who will forever be bound to my heart. i pray that God will allow us a relationship with each other. i pray that my child will know his birth mother. that he will know how brave she was and the hope and faith that she had for her child. i pray that no matter what the circumstances are surrounding us that God will receive all the glory forever and ever.

just a little information

just in case anyone was wondering... we are still waiting. we are still standing and believing that something will happen soon. we emailed our agency last week to see if there was ANYTHING we needed or could do to speed anything up. was there something on our profile that needed to be changed? did we need to update our information? and she assured us everything was great and we just needed to keep waiting and preparing.

she also told us to keep telling people about our adoption. being "home study approved" we have the ability to adopt from outside of our agency. so if you know a birth mother, that fits with our desires, who is looking for an adoption plan we would love to talk with her. if you know an agency that is having trouble finding placement for their infants we would love to know. we have no idea how God is working to bring our child to us. we will just keep spreading the word and ask that you keep spreading it too.

thank you so much for so many of you who have walked so faithfully beside since the beginning. and thanks to all the new people who are joining our journey and encouraging us along. we are so blessed to have such a large cheering section on this journey.

God is in control

this past week I have been looking back over the past almost year at just God's perfect timing. this time last year Brian and I were very much ready to start a family. we started praying that God would open up the doors. He started tugging on our heart strings. We thought we were ready for a family but as I look back I see that God was just preparing us for what was to come. here is a short list of what God has been doing to get us ready for this family that we thought we were ready for a year ago:

- in May of last year we joined an AMAZING small group at church
- in July we joined the Orphan Ministry at our church which is what God used to lead us to begin our family through adoption
- throughout the summer 3 of our friends found out they were pregnant (we now have 5 friends that are expecting and 1 just had their sweet baby girl about two weeks ago)
- in September we started the process of international adoption. met with out adoption agency and switched to Domestic Adoption so we could have a newborn for our first child
- in October because of God's favor we were able to get in the training class (we were supposed to be in the February one)
- Fall last year our jobs proved to be very supportive of our adopting and very flexible with our schedules to go to all our adoption meetings
- ever since October God has proved faithful to bring incredible friends and family along side of us to provide financially for this adoption.
- February we ordered baby furniture that should be in sometime in May
- March of this year waiting for our adoption approval with ONLY $4000 left to go!

God is just so good about his timing. it amazes me that he waited till we were surround by an amazing group of friends to walk with us on this journey. right now i am so emotionally torn about how to prepare for the arrival of our sweet baby boy. i so badly want to prepare for him to come really soon but I emotionally need to prepare for him to come sometime in December. God is certainly in the details. i feel completely confident that it's ok that i might not be completely prepared because i have an incredible group of friends who will be prepared for me. God has blessed us with friends that are also growing their families right now and we can just soak in all that information from them. we have an amazing church body that is filled with people joining in on our journey from a distance. people enjoy hearing our story and we love sharing it. God is even surprising us with how is providing for this adoption financially. i BELIEVE he will provide the last $4000 in the next two months.

we ask that you please pray that this approval process will go quickly and that we will be paired with a birthmom sooner rather than later. most of all please be in prayer for our baby boy as he is waiting in his mommy's womb. pray he stays healthy and that God will send his angels to surround him and him mommy during this time.

the letter and profile

tomorrow morning we have our very last meeting (we hope) with our agency before we are approved. we are so excited and so ready to be on the waiting end of things and bring our little boy home as soon as possible. one thing we have to bring with us tomorrow is a profile book. this profile book contains a letter from each of us to the birthfamily and 8 pages of pictures. this has been a very emotional journey putting this together. how in the world can you convey to someone everything that you are in one letter and a couple of pages of pictures. and how do you make yourself stand out above ALL the other waiting families. i'm trying not to stress myself out about it but i also don't want to take it lightly. for the past 2-3 weeks Brian and i have been putting picture together. we have pictures of family, friends, things we like to do, the house, the baby's room, and even jackson (our dog). and the scrapbooking queen in me wants to make it so creative but we have to make 5 copies of this profile and we have to be able to make a copy at a moments notice. so i can't really be that creative besides what we do on the computer. thankfully brian is super computer savy so he can make it look pretty cool.

the hardest part has been trying to write a letter to the brirth family but specifically to the birthmom. brian and i each have to write seperate letters because the agency told us it would be important to get a letter from the soon-to-be dad, which i completely agree with. but anyways i didn't realize how emotional it would be. i think i've written about 6 different drafts and finally last night i just needed it to be over with. in this letter we are supposed to encourage the mom in her decision and thank her for looking at our profile, share who we are, how brian and i met, what our relationship is like, what our family is like, is everyone excited about a baby coming, what do we like to do, what kind of parents do we want to be, what are our values, and so much more. and did i mention this all has to be in a 1 page letter? yeah, i might be able to fit it in to about 8 pages but not one. and then when i condense it down to one i feel like i am leaving out so much that i want her to know. and we've printed out some letters that other people have written and so many of them our the same. but how many ways can you say "thank you for reading my letter"? there just aren't that many ways. believe me i've thought long and hard about it.

well now i am finally finished with my letter. brian is still working on his but it should be finished tonight. our pictures are pretty much complete we just have to finish up a couple of the last pages. then tomorrow morning we have to wake up very early to run by kinkos to get copies made before we have to beat our appointment at 9:30am.

A few prayer requests:
-please pray that our letters will not be full of our own words but what God wants us to share.
-when a birthmother reads our letters that she is filled with peace and joy.
-brian and i would have peace about what we are presenting.
-our appointment tomorrow would be an amazing experience and we would be able to express exactly what God has laid on our hearts for our baby