Memories
I’ve been wanting to write down our latest adoption journey to try and capture all the details before I forget. Lately things have been, well, hectic. 2 parents, 5 kids, 2 dogs. Ooooh the puppy 😂. He’s a hot mess.
So we got licensed to be foster parents and did some respite care and waited to be matched with an older child who needed to be adopted. While we told the social workers we could take 1 child, I had another vision one day at a rummage sale of all places. I was at the local high school getting a new table and chairs for our dining room when a lady ran over to me and told me about the family who had donated it. She said “this was such a great table. My friend raised her 5 kids around this table.” I immediately felt my heart stir- and thought “oh crap we will not just adopt one more child- we will be asked to take two.” But it was a GOOD feeling- and I knew God was sending me a message to prepare my heart.
After a few months had passed, I received an email confirming the stir in my heart. Immediately a picture of two sisters captured my heart and I knew they would be my daughters.They were placed in our home and now we are legally theirs. They have been through a rough journey and have endured way too much at such young ages. But they are the light of our lives, completely cherished and valued, and we cannot imagine our lives without them!
Follow those promptings in your hearts because they will lead to goodness and stretch your life beyond what you could ever have hoped for. Hard? Yes. Worth it? Completely.
We adopted our son Sam when he was 8 months old. He is now rapidly approaching 13. We had always considered foster care and adoption again, but if you’re aware of our history as captured in the archives of this old blog, we went back to school to change careers when sam was 3. So we weren’t in the position to enter back into that world while we raised our three kids and studied.
About 4 years ago we were brought through a terribly trying time as a family. For about two years leading up to the fall of 2016, our son Pete had some psychological issues come about that we were baffled by. We think he may have had some rapid changes brought about by a possible neurological infection (sometimes caused by strep). We worked with him daily and helped him through crippling anxiety and sometimes rages. It was hard on all of us but especially him, because he didn’t understand why it was happening. With a dedicated medical team we got through it. Then I got sick with a mystery virus that caused encephalitis (possibly Lyme disease) and Pete was hospitalized with an unexplained illness that caused anaphylaxis. As we all took months to recover and started feeling good again, we felt a thankfulness like never before. God had brought us through the desert.
That’s when I started having visions again. My husband loves it when this happens (jk 😂). When we adopted Sam I had had a vision of who this child was and even his name. That’s some weirdness, I know. Try actually having one.
This time around I started realizing there would be another daughter in our family. A 10 year old girl named Jordan was available for adoption through foster care and reading about her prompted our whole family to get on board with becoming licensed foster parents. According to her caseworker, she was adopted! I hope someday I can tell that child that her life inspired us to take a leap of faith!
So we got licensed to be foster parents and did some respite care and waited to be matched with an older child who needed to be adopted. While we told the social workers we could take 1 child, I had another vision one day at a rummage sale of all places. I was at the local high school getting a new table and chairs for our dining room when a lady ran over to me and told me about the family who had donated it. She said “this was such a great table. My friend raised her 5 kids around this table.” I immediately felt my heart stir- and thought “oh crap we will not just adopt one more child- we will be asked to take two.” But it was a GOOD feeling- and I knew God was sending me a message to prepare my heart.
After a few months had passed, I received an email confirming the stir in my heart. Immediately a picture of two sisters captured my heart and I knew they would be my daughters.They were placed in our home and now we are legally theirs. They have been through a rough journey and have endured way too much at such young ages. But they are the light of our lives, completely cherished and valued, and we cannot imagine our lives without them!
Follow those promptings in your hearts because they will lead to goodness and stretch your life beyond what you could ever have hoped for. Hard? Yes. Worth it? Completely.
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