Our journey through adoption.

I have been asked by some people, “does going through the process of adoption help you move on from your losses?” My answer is “no, I have hope for our future to have a family, but my faith that one day I will be reunited with my angels in heaven allows me to “move on.” I told Darrel the other night through tears, that I am completely trustful of the Lord that He has allowed our losses and our struggles to start a family for reasons. As hard as these years have been on us we’ve learned what it means to rely solely on the Lord. I also through this blog, try to always express myself openly, so if anyone who is going through infertility, or loss can relate or even gain hope in their struggles, then the Lord is working through me to help others and that makes my losses “worth” more than just “losses”. The pain of not being able to hold a baby in me til term is undescriable…the pain of those times and the pain of knowing I may never be able to have a child of my own, takes my breath away, it hurts down deep and I grieve for my losses.  But my hope is that the Lord continues to use me, however He chooses to. Last night the question came up in small group about how deep our faith is, if faced with something as final as death would we still have faith to say, “I trust you Lord, no matter what you take away from me, I will still trust you…” My answer is yes, I learned the hard way the 1st time we lost our baby, what running away from my faith will do to a person, it will break you…I know though from losing my 2nd baby, that running towards the Lord gives you that confidence to say ”yes, I will still have faith and trust even in the worst of circumstances.” Below is a poem that I would like to share:

“I’m sorry about the miscarriage -
but I guess you’re excited because
at least you conceived.”

They really meant well.
They knew we had been infertile up to the time of conception.
They were trying to look on the “good side” of this difficult time.

What they seemed to miss was the fact that we had just lost a very real part of our family . . . That our ecstatic joy over the pregnancy had taken a 360 degree turn into mourning for one who would not be born .

That it doesn’t matter how many other people have miscarried or how many children they had later on or
how there must have been something wrong with the baby or that we can try again . . .

What they seemed to miss was the fact that this child was gone.
That this was the child we had already grown to love.
That this little boy or girl would not even get a proper funeral.
That the womb had become a place of death instead of life.

I forgive them for not knowing.
They meant well.
And although I may never understand this life,
I can praise God that our little one is with his heavenly Father.

And though we will always grieve
The absence of our precious one,
We know because of our Lord Jesus Christ -
One day we will be reunited with our child.

Yes, we lost our precious little one.
But just for a brief period of time.
And the hurt we feel is greatly comforted
Because we will see our child someday,
When we are reunited in heaven.

If anyone’s ever dated before you remember getting the butterflies when that person would say sweet things to you and you couldn’t help but have a huge smile on your face. Last night I remembered that feeling in my stomach, Darrel was sitting on one couch and me the other and he just said “Jul, you are my life.” I felt like I was 14 years old again He’ll probably kill me for writing this because he likes to appear to be a tough guy, but he really is a softie. We had a really neat conversation about what we would like to see happen in our future and what we as indivisuals and a couple need to do to make these goals happen. We both agree that we want to step out and really witness more to others, we want to start walking 4 times a week, with our dogs so the 4 of us can get in better shape. (Last night we went for a long walk and Wake barely made it home, poor guy, haha), and our list kind of is long, so I won’t bore you with it all, but of course high on our list too, is to continue to be faithful in prayer about all areas of our life, highest on our prayer list is of course: adoption. So that is about it, I just had to write about Darrel’s sweet comment, he doesn’t say things like that often, but I’m blessed because he does make me feel like I’m “his life” each and every day!

Last week Iris had called us to let us know she would be out of town over the weekend, therefore, she wouldn’t have a chance to work on the home-study paperwork. In other words, I think she was saying it may be a little longer than she had originally told us. So we are just waiting…in the meantime this week I have work off for spring break and already today I’m going crazy just being home. I love my job, its perfect, I get home early enough but it also gets me going in the morning, and keeps me busy usually when I get home too, so if I were not working and just waiting for everything to happen adoption wise, I think I would go absolutely crazy! I started to reread a Christian book about adoption. There is a paragraph that I would like to share~ The process of adoption is a lot like childbirth; you cannot fully understand it until you have experienced it. Adoption will touch you in every part of your  life: emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, financially and relationally. The best way to describe the emotional climate of adoption is that it is a roller coaster ride (thats the phrase I’ve used quite a bit in this blog). But you are not on this roller-coaster ride for fun or amusement. Rather, you are putting yourselves out there in a way that is unique and frightening. You are trying to sell yourselves without seeming too obvious. You want a child with your whole heart, and your emotions are easily affected by your circumstances. As you experience your personal rollercoaster ride, most birthmothers will be experiencing their own roller coaster ride as they carry their pregnancies to term and pursue their decision making processes. Quite simply, there is no prior experience that can adquetely prepare either birthmother or prospective adoptive parents for the emotionally charged business of adoption.” The more Darrel and I talk about adoption with each other and with others, the more we feel ready, but at the same time we know the hardest parts are yet to come. I think about the birthmother almost every day, I think about whether she is pregnant yet? Whether she is taking care of herself and her body? Whether she has a support system? So as we wait, I just pray for her, and our baby…the paragraph ends “God is the author and director of our lives. We have to believe that if God has put the idea of adoption into our hearts, He will bring it about in His time!

For us as an adoptive couple we can’t really prepare a whole lot for what may or may not happen while we wait for news of our baby. Even after our baby is born and handed over into our arms, we still will have to wait 12-14 days until the court date to be told “officially” we are parents of the baby. We feel prepared, as prepared as we can possibly be for the rest of this journey…we are both excited, but also hesitant, happy but also scared, its a wide mix of emotions. I do pray the Lord allows this journey to go smoothly and quite honestly easy. We’ve endured a lot, I know others have endured much more than us in their hopes to start a family, but I do feel like we’ve endured much pain, and I hope that we don’t have to face more heartbreak…is that selfish? In taking our parenting classes about adoption we realize that adoption starts with loss…for the birthparents, the adoptive child, and us as a adoptive couple…everyone involved has “lost” something…with adoption also comes gains, and I know with all my heart the gains will outweigh the losses by alot. Darrel and I are trying to be very realistic about what our child will experience differently than a child who is not adopted..the one coping tool that we learned about is to make a Lifebook for our child.  A Lifebook is a book from the beginning of our process to adopt, all the way through their life…its a way for our child to know our hopes and dreams for them even before we knew who they were…to save any information about the birthparents and to just mark all their lives. This blog is great, because its the beginning of our baby’s Lifebook. Our hearts are so ready to be parents…I don’t feel like our two angels we’ve lost was the Lord’s way of telling us “you weren’t ready to be parents” I feel like the Lord has taken us down this path for just the opposite reason…to prepare us for our child, who will experience “loss” in their lives, we are going to be able to understand our child when they grieve for what they’ve lost…but also to give them all the love we have stored up in our hearts over the past few years of waiting, our child will be loved with all our hearts and we cannot wait to meet the little person that the Lord has been leading us to for all these years!

That is our caseworkers famous words! Today we had our 2nd and final homestudy meeting and it went great. She had some hard questions for both of us, but we both did well. So she said we will be on a waiting list in a week and a half or two weeks depending on some final things Darrel and I need to complete. We are both “exhausted”, it takes a lot of emotional “energy” to get through this process but we are so close and then like Iris said ” it will be waiting time”…she made us both feel so good today as we were walking her out, she said ” you two are going to make excellent parents, I wish a birthmom could come in and see you two and your home, some homes I go into and it just doesn’t feel right, or I feel like one partner is being “forced” to say specific answers, but you two are united, in love and it shows in how you communicate with each other, a child will be very lucky to be in your home!” It meant alot to both of us, we pray before people come into our home,that they feel blessed and even though they may not know why they feel blessed, we know its the Lord blessing them! SO 2 WEEKS! Wow, what a journey we’ve been on and its not over yet, it actually is just beginning probaby, we are so excited to meet our baby! So excited that each day is one day closer to meeting our little angel!

Today the changing table arrived, it was a fun surprise to pull up and see it there, they had our crib but for whatever reason couldn’t leave the crib too, so tomorrow the crib will be here when I get home too. I was so excited that I couldn’t wait to open it and see the colors of the wood, so I opened the changing table and its going to be a beautiful room!

Today I took an online parenting course, so we are up to 6 hours, only have 4 more hours to complete. And saturday is our 2nd and last homestudy visit until after we have our baby, then Iris will return for two more visits after the baby has been with us for 3 and 6 months!

The Lord answered a prayer about my schooling. The other night I received an email in my school email account about a program that only cost $560 and what this program allows is for people like me who has a BA and moved to the state of Idaho, to take their 2 tests to get my credential. YES, its that simple, I donot have to complete an credential program through a university. Just take these 2 tests, pass them and I will be a credentialed teacher through the state of Idaho. Don’t get me wrong though, these test are intense, they recommend a year of studying to pass these tests. But Darrel and I feel so relieved, because NNU was going to cost close to $15,000 after all was said and done, and I would have to be in class for 2 nights a week, and it just didn’t feel good because we knew if we were to have a baby then I wouldn’t complete the program because the baby would come first…so I’m going to pursue this option and it may be that I can’t teach next year, but it feels right for us, finicially and also it gives us peace of mind that I will have my credential. Today though when I was looking at all my students and a rush of sadness came over me that I probably won’t be teaching next year, and I do love teaching with all my heart, so that will be really hard on me if I can’t teach next year.

And lastly, the Lord is blessing Darrel tremendously with business. He is at a 100% goal for this week and the business is just pouring in, so he feels so good about this and he is almost confident that he will still have a job and he may even start earning bonuses now if this keeps going the way it has been going for the last 3 weeks. It was neat today when he came home he had a big smile on his face, he was so proud to say that he reached 100% goal this week, and he just said “I’m not worried” and I asked what do you mean and he just said “I’m not worried, we are going to be okay”…deep down in my heart I do hope for a new job for Darrel but also deep down in my heart I know the Lord will do amazing things through Darrel in whatever position and at whatever company He desires for him to work! And I truly believe the Lord is teaching us both that our feeling of “security” need to rest solely in Him and nothing else, which is hard because we are human, but its also the most reassuring, safe place to rest our lives in His perfect hands!

 

Friday everyone pitched in to help childproof our home. The boys installed door latches and the girls helped clear things out.  We have such amazing support! Saturday went good, she dug into some pretty heavy questions right away and then did the safety check. She asked about our marriage, our 2 babies, how we dealt with the grief, and about our faith. We told her, our faith is what got us through our grief, and the grief is something we will deal with forever, but that we know the path the Lord has on is the path He desires us to be on to start our family. Iris was very warm and made us feel really good. She said “boy, I wish I had a baby to give to you right now!” So this Saturday she comes for a 2-3 hour visit to dig into our autobiograhies, and the more personal stuff (even though it was really personal on Saturday) this will be the most personal areas of our lives. We feel good though, and are glad we passed part 1 of 2, now we just need to pass part 2 of 2!

Mindy’s baby shower was fun! The food was so good, the games were fun and she got a lot of gifts and good mommy advice from everyone. All that matters to me was that she had a good time and I think we acheived that.

Yesterday we got so messed up from the time change we woke up at 11:30, ahhh. Sometimes I feel guilty because I love to sleep, but I figure we need to take this time to sleep because once a baby is here there won’t be anymore sleep in days for us (which I will glady exchange my sleep for our baby)!We took an afternoon drive to a nearby lake, it was a beautiful day!I love just being with Darrel. Sometimes we don’t even talk while we drive, we just hold hands and just enjoy the quiet times too, like yesterday. So that is about all the news I have for now. Another long blog, sorry, I really need to learn how to shorten them, this one is just long because we had a busy weekend with lots to report on.

The past couple months have felt like a whirlwind, but this week I feel like I’ve been spinning around and can’t stop! Yesterday afternoon we were assigned a caseworker, last night at 9pm our caseworker called to schedule our 1st homestudy appt. and tomorrow morning at 9:30 she comes for 1 out of 2 visits. To go back a few steps though, I called our adoption agency to check up on a few things and they had told me they were waiting on a couple things and we couldn’t move forward until our packet was 100% done, so I was a feeling frustrated and Darrel told me “Jul you have to be patient, everything isn’t going to go quickly” so I had just gotten over my frustration and just said to myself “patience, these are the steps, this whole process is going to be little steps” and so when I received the call last night, I was blown away. So tomorrow is our safety part of the homestudy, she will be going through our home  to check all safety measures, usually she does this part on her 2nd visit but I explained to her that I didn’t want to say we couldn’t do our homestudy but that I am holding a baby shower for a friend (Mindy) tomorrow at our home, so our home isn’t set up as it normally is due to the shower…” And she said “Sweetie, you have a life, I don’t expect you to stop it because I’m coming over, your house doesn’t need to look perfect, you set up for the baby shower, it will be fun for me to see it, and hopefully the next baby shower you will be attending will be your own.” so after she said that I was so releived. So I called everyone after that call and tonight everyone is coming over to help us put latches on our cabinet doors, Mindy already came over this afternoon and helped me put in all the light socket covers (she was so sweet she went and bought everything we could possibly need so I didn’t have to do it, thank you Min!) and so hopefully tomorrow will go great. This week has just been kaotic, my kiddos in school have been on fire, I’m a perfectionist so of course the baby shower decorations have to be perfect, my house has to be perfectly clean, we have the first part of our homestudy tomorrow morning, Mindy’s baby shower in the afternoon, its going to be a fun, kaotic next 24 hours! So please if you read the blog today, lift us up in prayers for tomorrow. We did not EXPECT to be doing this part so soon, so we are a little caught off guard BUT we are SO excited that its moving along. And the homestudy is the part we have to pass to move onto the waiting lists. So pray for us to be calm…pray for us to get our parenting classes finished and get working on our profile! Check back in for the report from tomorrow about the baby shower and the homestudy visit.

 My parents are two of the most giving people we know. Today my parents blessed us with the beautiful gift of buying our crib and changing table for our nursery. They obviously didn’t have to give a gift like this to us, but they wanted to do this for us. Here is a part of the email my mom sent to us after buying our nursery furniture:

 ”I can’t tell you how happy it makes dad and me that you and Darrel are so happy.  It’s a blessing.” and then Darrel wrote and to say thank you and this is her repsonse to him 

 The word giving to me has always meant more than just money or materialistic gifts, its giving of yourself to others, through actions, through love, through commitment, through sensitivity, through remembering, just giving 100% to making others feel important. My Mom and Dad show this giving to us, they have given Darrel and I such amazing gifts, they never cease to amaze me in their generosity and the joy in which they do things for us. They’ve prayed hand in hand with Darrel and I, they have prayed over the phone with us, they have gone down to their knees countless times to lift us up to the Lord, they have shown us sensivity in understanding the hurt we’ve been through, they’ve always remembered those especially hard days with acknowledging through words, flowers or notes, they celebrate and rejoice with us when good things happen. The gits they give us always come from their heart and without expectation of anything in return.  I hope we can pass along those same gifts to our kids as they have to us. They make us feel loved and that is the greatest gift of all. The Lord blesses those who give of themselves, not just with money but of themselves in all areas of their hearts, I don’t think I can ever repay my parents for all they’ve given to us, but I know the Lord is going to bless them, and there is no better blessing than the blessings that come from the Lord! Darrel and I experience and see the Lord though my parents actions, words, thoughtfulness, generosity, their faithfulness to us and most importantly unconditional love!

When Darrel and I talk or pray for the mom and baby, we say “If the baby is already growing or when the baby will be growing…” we obviously don’t know the answer to that question yet, but today I got an email from Christine and she said the same thing “its exciting to think maybe the baby has already been conceived?”…(Christine and I have never talked about that) so I think its the same thing for all hopeful adoptive parents, you dream about these things! I asked Darrel if he would prefer to be chosen from the beginning of a pregnancy or get that random call about our baby, he said he prefers to be chosen and experience that 9 months, I said I would have fun getting the random call. Either way it will be pefect! Last night I had fun looking for cribs and dreaming about nurseries too, ALOT of people on waiting lists already have a room prepared, I feel like we are ready to take that step. It makes me sad to think we may not have a baby in a “done” room for a long time, but I also feel like it would be neat to be able to go in that room “completed” and pray for our baby. I go in there already and just sit on the carpet and ask the Lord to bless us with a baby…so it would be neat to have a room ready and be praying. Today Darrel is turning in the $800 so we’ll see when they schedule the caseworker to come? It should be within a couple weeks from what we are told? So were getting there, step by step by step, its getting closer. I’m so excited, each day it feels like we are getting closer to meeting this little person!