Big News for our Family

This week was a big week for our family. After discussing, researching, and praying for awhile, we submitted the application to adopt a little girl from China. We’ve always known that we wanted another child, and I’ve been interested in adoption for a long time. There are many reasons that we’ve decided to adopt, but the biggest one is that we feel that God is leading us to do this and that this is the right time for us.

Pregnancies are really difficult for me, and when I was pregnant with Ezra, I really felt that it was going to be my last pregnancy. I can’t explain it, but I just prepared myself that this would be the last time I felt a baby’s movement inside of me, or the last time I would be in labor or holding my newborn baby. However, Dan and I still had the desire to have three kids. Dan loved his family dynamic of three when he was growing up, and I liked the idea of having a little more activity in the house from my two-child family. When we lived in Lynchburg, our church, Brentwood, had an amazing program called Mosaic. Basically, it’s all about taking care of children without families, whether it be through adoption, foster care, or mentoring. Learning about this really struck a chord for me, and after learning more about it, I always had it in the back of my mind as something that I wanted to do. I was pregnant with Ezra at the time, so it wasn’t the right time for our family to start an adoption process, though.

I always knew growing up that my grandfather grew up in an orphanage, but I didn’t really understand the significance of that until I had my own kids. Thinking about my boys living in an orphanage without anyone to truly love them and take care of them was heartbreaking. I was even more heartbroken when I read my grandfather’s journal a few years ago. He was in an orphanage from the time he was three until about twelve. He talked about how sad he would be when the children were lined up when families came to pick out a child to adopt. He said he was never chosen because he wasn’t the cutest, and he felt so bad about himself then. My grandpa was a very special person to me, and I cried reading about what he went through. I can’t imagine any child going through that, and I want to make a very small difference by loving our daughter the way he never got to be loved as a child.

Our purpose for this blog is that all of our friends and family can be on this journey with us. We hope to update you on the paperwork process, the waiting, the fundraising, the referral process, medical reviews, and when we eventually travel to China. We are so excited to meet our little girl, and so are her brothers. Levi has decided that the only three names that are acceptable for his sister from China are Darth Vader, Peter Pan, or Margaret. We’ll have to work on that.