We’re adding to our family!

Wow… I don’t even know how to start this blog post. After a bit of a journey, Zach and I have decided to actively pursue a domestic infant adoption. We made this decision together on September 8, 2019 and have jumped in head first into the process.

SIDE NOTE: If I don’t know you already, my name is Amanda. Nice to meet you! I can only speak for myself here and while Zach, my husband, has full liberty to write on this blog in the future, I imagine most of these blog posts will be written by me.

How did we get here?

I’ve always thought adoption was such a beautiful way to illustrate the Gospel here on Earth. The Bible has a lot to say about adoption, and I grew up hearing and learning about it often. Some things that have stood out in my mind are:

"But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. ... So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.  (Galatians 4:4-7)

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)

Growing up I was definitely exposed to adoption, my childhood best friend was adopted and our lead pastor at our church had two adopted children. That being said, I don’t think I really gave it a whole lot of thought in terms of my personal role in adoption in the future. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to watch a family on YouTube that had adopted two girls that I started to wrestle with a personal call in my life to adopt. This family illustrated a different side of adoption that I had never seen: Open Adoption. Through watching this family live out their open adoptions, my heart began to soften.

About a year ago, in the fall of 2018, I shared for the first time with Zach my heart for adoption and how I felt adoption should be something we considered in the future. After talking it through, we both agreed that somehow adoption would be in our future but that we wouldn’t actively pursue it at that time. You see, at that point we had been trying to conceive for close to a year, I had just been diagnosed with PCOS, and “Having a biological child seems like it’s going to take enough of our attention for now” was something I remember saying. 

Over the course of the year, God has certainly stretched us. He’s stretched me physically through countless numbers of medical treatments and he’s stretched my imagination of what might be possible through two wild opportunities to adopt seemingly falling in our lap. {more on that in a future blog post}

Your doctor is strongly advising against pregnancy this cycle, and he would like you to schedule a consultation to discuss future option 

Voicemail left May 31, 2019 from our fertility clinic

After an almost 18 month roller coaster ride this left both of us spiraling down fast. So we pumped the brakes. For the sake of our mental and emotional health, we both made the decision to take the summer off from all fertility treatments. Honestly, it was the best decision we could’ve made all year.

This summer has been so sweet in many ways and has helped us to re-ground our relationship with one another. We’ve had so much fun together this summer! But as summer turned to fall there was a looming shadow of fertility treatments. 

We had already decided to change fertility doctors {more on that in a future blog post}, and I was honestly a little nervous about starting it all again. In my own mind I had already resolved “We’ll do another round of treatments until we reach our breaking point once more… and THEN we’ll stop treatments and pursue adoption”. I began to dread the thought of going back to the doctor, but felt re-energized at the thought of it taking us to the path of adoption faster. 

We were sitting in the airport about to fly out to see family in Texas when I finally shared these thoughts and feelings with Zach. At that point I was beginning to think “we should just skip straight to adoption, neither one of us are excited about doing more fertility treatments” but I didn’t dare say that out loud. We discussed the nuts and bolts (as we had understood them at the time) of adoption such as estimated waiting times and cost and Zach had a little bit of shock. I thought I had ruined our whole trip by bringing it up. I barely even brought it up the remainder of the weekend until we were flying back home. 

On the flight back we discussed it further and it was that evening that Zach looked at me and said “I think we should start the adoption process now instead of waiting until the Spring.”

So here we are… smack dab in the middle of a huge pile of paperwork. We’ve picked the agency that will take care of our home study and post-placement visits and our home study visit is scheduled to take place in the next week or so. 

I started this blog for a few different reasons… 

I have a few blog posts planned for the immediate future, but don’t know what my posting frequency might be long term.