How we got here

For some, this news may have come as quite a suprise & others may have known this has been a long time coming. The journey to get where we are at has been nothing short of a miracle with it's many twists & turns. The hand of God is so evident on this path that I look back with amazement & awe at how He has placed certain things in our lives to get us here with complete submission to His will. Well, maybe not fully complete because I guess if I look back I can still see the claw marks of trying to get ourselves out of jumping into something that will cause us to get out of our comfort zone. But God doesn't really care about our comfort. He cares about our character.

Before we were married, we had said adoption was something that we'd love to someday but we had other things we'd like to do first. The first time it was brought up in our marriage was by Brian. I know he'd cringe at the thought now knowing what he started!! ha! It was when Wyatt was a 1 1/2 & there were 2 boys in foster care that we had heard about that were close to Wyatt's age. Brian mentioned it to me & I honestly had to think about it. We decided to look a little closer into it & after a couple weeks, we felt God closing those doors. We decided to have 1 more biological child, in which we thought would be our last. We then were blessed with Dawson Bradley, who was given to us for only 2 short weeks. Oh what our son taught us in that short amount of time! We left the hospital unsure of the risks of having any more biological children & discussed adoption again. After meeting with a geneticist, we decided the risk of having another child with the same syndrome would be small. We were blessed with another pregnancy very soon after. 5 months to the day of saying goodbye to Dawson, we said goodbye to yet another child as I had miscarried that baby. We picked ourselves up & tried again, being reassured that it was just a fluke. We were blessed again to be expecting very soon after. At 8 1/2 weeks, we were again experiencing some complications and were told to expect another miscarriage. That night, we had decided that enough was enough & after some time passed, we would proceed with the adoption route. We were scheduled for an ultrasound the next morning & to our suprise, there was a healthy baby with a strong beating heart. That little baby who we never thought would be here is now our Jackson Bradley. His name means "God is gracious" and he holds that name very well & we thank God for Him everyday.

After Jackson was born, we decided we were done & proceeded to get rid of all our baby stuff. Why not?? We were done, right? I think God had a good laugh about that! About a year & a half ago, I had started seeing the need for families for african american babies. I mentioned it to Brian & he quickly said "no". I pretty much knew he would say that but I had to try. Our living conditions weren't the most ideal in that house so I told him I was going to do lots of research & just see what all goes into it. That brought me to some blogs that I decided to follow. I thought it was neat to read but never really thought it would turn into us proceeding with it. As life would have it, some twists & turns happened with us moving into a different home & deciding not to build that we see all as His plan. About 6 weeks ago, Brian & I sat down to talk about it some more & decided on what needed to happen for us to actually proceed on the adoption process. I felt good about it & thought that at least we had a plan now. We were guessing it would take a few months for all those things to fall into place but I was okay with that. God had other plans. It only took 1 week for them all to fall into place! How could we deny what God was telling us then?? We both knew it but for another week I think we were in denial & just didn't bring it up. We both had our fears & reasons not to do it. None of them trumped the fact that God was calling us to do this & that none of them was a good enough excuse to leave a child without a mother & a father. So here we are! We hope that this gives a little insight into how this has been a long process to even get to this point & this decision has not been made lightly. We know God will equip us with what we need to go through this & He will only use it for our good!