To my little one,

Welcome to the incredible journey that God has our family on! Last May, God blessed us with the birth and adoption of your big brother, Brayden. Brayden has brought us more joy than we have ever known and has been teaching us so much about what it means to love unconditionally. When we look back on our journey to Bray, we are still and will probably always be amazed at what God has done for us!

Soon after the finalization of Brayden’s adoption, I sensed that God wasn’t done with our family yet. While we always knew that we would adopt again, we didn’t realize how soon God would knock on the door of our hearts a second time. Fortunately, this time around, it didn’t take me nearly as long to realize that He was and continues to be preparing us for YOU! You have been on my heart and in my thoughts so much throughout the past few months and I am finding it impossible to describe how much I love you already!

Sometimes it is so frustrating that I don’t know the details or the timing of your adoption. Just as it was with Brayden, though, we know that God is preparing us for each other and we trust that His timing will again be perfect. We truly can’t wait until the day we can hold you in our arms. But, until then, we will trust you in the arms of our precious Father.

To close, we are praying for protection, love, and peace to surround both you and your birth mommy. God is still at work in writing our family’s story and we are so excited to meet the final piece of our happily ever after! Grow in peace, my little one, knowing that you are already unconditionally loved.

Love and prayers,
Mommy

Our Adoption Journey, Chapter 2

The adoption bug has bit us again…already! In the past few months, Seth and I have been discussing when to pursue our second (and final?) adoption. Ideally, of course, we would wait for 2 to 3 years for our second child. However, as adoptive parents, we have some reasons why that is not necessarily the best option. The main reason is that our home study is set to be renewed next March. Even though we have heard that renewing a home study isn’t nearly as stressful as starting from scratch, it would still require redoing quite a bit of things. In addition, it would be an additional expense on top of the other adoption fees. Despite these reasons, though, Seth and I had still decided to hold off on our second adoption until we recovered financially from Brayden’s adoption. In addition, we wanted to be sure that we were building a strong enough attachment and relationship with Brayden. The mistake in this decision, however, was that we forgot to include God and His plan for our family in the process. Seriously, did we learn nothing on our journey to adopt Bray? :-) Soon after being okay with our decision, God dropped several possibilities for adoption into our lap. This caused us to begin rethinking our decision and reminded us to add prayer into any future decisions. Our biggest obstacle, of course, was still finances. While I know that if it is meant to happen God will provide, I still had a lot of worries. The last thing that we wanted to do was to jump into an adoption that we can’t afford, so I decided to schedule a meeting with our financial advisor. After talking with him yesterday, we got the “go ahead.” Wow! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to hear that! I thought that it would be the meeting that would close the door on any adoptions in the near future. It is looking as if God wants us to move forward with this, though. So……here we go again! Despite some lingering fears, I am excited to be on this journey again. God, the author of our family story, is still at work and we are looking forward to what He has in store for the three of us! I, of course, will keep all of you updated throughout this next chapter in our journey. Prayers for wisdom and clarity would be greatly appreciated at this point!