Welcome to our corner of the web! Here you will learn about our family and our journey of a family member adoption. In July of 2010, after 9 years of trying to add to our family and 5 years after we started our adoption journey, we welcomed baby Emily Rose. Emily's birth mom is Sharon's adopted sister. We look forward to someday adopting more children but for now, we are enjoying our time together as a family of 4!

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Adoption Rocks! ***Guest Blogger

Today's guest blogger is Chantel. I met Chantel at our mutual friend Kim's house. Kim is one of the co-owners for the r house couture. They were doing a photo shoot for their latest adoption wear and my Emily and her little man were models. He is seriously the cutest! We met again at the Girls Night Out before the FSA Conference. She is so sweet and I was so excited when she said she would share her story. Here is it:

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I was very excited to be asked to share our story! I tend to be long winded when I talk, so I will try to make this post short and sweet!
My husband and I were marred in 2001. We soon wanted to start a family. We learned this may be a little more challenging than we thought. Through fertility treatment, our daughter, Morgan, was born in 2004. With no fertility treatment, we were surprised with our son, Maxwell in 2005.
In 2007, we wanted to add to our family again. All fertility treatments we tired failed. It was a very hard time for us. One night I was up looking at blogs and came across an adoption blog. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The baby that was coming into our house was NOT going to come through any amount of medical treatment. There was a sweet birth mother out there that was going to bring this child into our home. Our heart had always been open to adoption but we were now financially more prepared for it.
We began to look into what agency we wanted to use and we found Heart to Heart. I knew our baby was there. We began filling out the endless piles of paper work and became an “active family” in January of 2011. I was sure our baby would come into our home in days (a girl can dream, right?). I was wrong. We had 10 birth mothers look at our profile from January to April. We would get our hopes up every time we got a call only to find out they had chosen another family. I was about at my limit. My husband and I talked out pulling our profile until we moved in July and just resuming our adoption process once we had gotten settled from the move. We felt that would be best. I got on the computer Friday morning to email our case worker and let her know we wanted our profile put on hold for a while. Much to my surprise, there was an email from Heart to Heart in my inbox. It was a birth mother profile and I glanced over it. I didn’t give it a second thought and just replied. We would love to be shown, but I think this is the last one until we move. I also had a few questions about the birth mother I wanted answered and asked if she could call us on Monday with more information.
We went about our weekend and had a really late night Saturday night. The phone rang at 3:00 AM Sunday morning. My husband works at a hospital so it isn’t unusual to get random calls that early in the morning! I heard him say “I will go get my wife” I remember being confused at this point! He came in the bedroom and said “Kim is on the phone, the baby we heard about on Friday was born this morning!” I quickly answered the phone and Kim told me the birth mom we had received information on went into labor early and delivered a healthy baby boy. We were the family that had been chosen and if we didn’t think it was too fast, we could come and meet him! Too soon? Are you kidding me? I said we would be there and jumped out of bed! Our kids were soon woken up by all the excitement and we celebrated as a family. We knelt in prayer and thanked our Heavenly Father for this blessing. The spirit confirmed this was our baby. Our little guy was born in Utah and we were living in Missouri. We loaded our van as quickly as we could and raced to Utah to pick him up. We drove straight through and arrived in Utah late Sunday night.
Monday morning we drove to the hospital to meet our sweet birth mom and baby. I was so nervous walking into the hospital. The second I saw our birth mom, my nerves were put to ease. She is amazing. Words can’t accurately describe how we feel about her. She is strong and has been through a lot. She told us that she knew her baby was meant to be a blessing for someone else. How awesome is that? We felt nothing but pure love for her. She was truly doing the most selfless thing and brought this miracle into our home. We walked in together, my husband and I hand in hand, and our birth mom by our side to meet our baby. It still makes me tear up to think about it. Here was a perfect miracle. It was more than we could have asked for. Our hearts almost burst with joy. We named him Isaac and thank the Lord every day for the joy and blessing he has brought to our home. We share an open adoption with our birth family and it works well for all of us. We love having them in our life and sharing the miracle of adoption. I love that as Isaac grows, he can get to know the people who created him and brought him into our home. Without them, none of this could have been possible. We love our open adoption!

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