We are excited to announce the next part of the journey Jesus has for our family! We are adopting!! When we were engaged, one day having a big family and adopting were all parts of our conversations as we dreamed about our future life together. 11 years of marriage later, 2 amazing sons (with 2 complicated deliveries and pregnancies), and after moving across country, we began to feel again God's nudge that it was now time to open the door for adoption.
Since then we have been met with incredible encouragement and support from both those who have walked this journey before, and those who believe in the call.
We are excited and doing everything we can to be prepared to welcome in our missing piece to love and care for. As part of our adoption process, we have started a crowdfunding campaign. It may surprise you to hear that adoption-related costs can easily total up to $35.000 or more. This is why we have set this as our goal to help ease the financial burden that often overwhelms adoptive parents. We hope that by including you in this process, you will see yourself as part of the community we hope to build around our child as he/she grows up.
We know this is God's heart, and He has made it our heart as well. As for our boys… they are beyond STOKED and are currently praying daily for this little one they will personally get to love and cherish.
Each time in the past we found out we were pregnant, there was that season of denial as your only proof was a positive pregnancy test left on the counter. Later morning sickness, food aversions and a growing belly help bring reality toward the preparation and enduring love around a little one that will soon be known.
In our adoption journey, we have called our paperwork and preparation the "womb season". We have the so-to-speak positive test on the counter as we meet with social workers and complete necessary background checks, but in exchange we have no "growing belly" to show that there is a countdown in movement toward bringing a child home to us.
Our womb season has had us rely on daydreaming, prayerfully imagining the gender and age that will soon be sitting in the backseat of the car and around the dinner table. To help bring reality around our waiting, we constantly talk about the boy's little brother/sister and imagine what they might be like and what we might introduce them too.
Courage every night prays for this child and asks Jesus to protect him or her if they are still in their mommy's belly or if they are sleeping in a crib. He is prepping his little heart for the mystery we walk toward and the act of faith in unraveling to gift of a new precious life in our home.
In faith, we pick out names like we did for our boys. We decorate the child's home and baby/toddler proof the home. We walk through stores and walk down the younger kid isle and revisit the toys our boys once played with.
In this womb season, Zion had a dream that we brought home a girl. Courage was still in a hard boy vote whispering that God would bring a boy after we asked God to help make us open to boy or girl. "I just don't know about pink or dolls" he would answer.
But recently... Courage said he wants a girl instead. We have to admit our little man's motive are a bit off, as he wants a sister "to be a spy for them to decode the girl language". But hey, we'll receive his openness to whoever Jesus will bring to our home to love, and we honor the sweet little humor in the journey of the womb season.
Currently, we are pressing into our next step in the journey of receiving and applying for cases! We just finished our home study and as we wait for the written form of it, we prayerfully invite Jesus to have the stage in this next place of the journey!
