We’re Pregnant!

Well, not really. I bet I got you there. In fact, if you’re my mom I bet your heart does a flip flop every time you read the title of this blog post. People often say I’m a lot like you, mom… and mine does when I read it and I wasn’t even tricked into thinking it was true!

HOWEVER, we are expecting… in a sort of way. Adoption is back on our horizon. We read this blog post about Hailee here (they have updated several times about Hailee since that blog was posted in May) and that along with the journey God has been taking our hearts on for the last several years is calling us to action. We do not know where we are adopting from, we do not know who, we don’t know how old they’ll be, we don’t know what their special needs will be and we mostly are just doing a lot of not knowing.

Some of the things we know (or at least think we know):

We can’t have a long required travel time in the country we are adopting from. (Maggie and Anna can’t be without Mommy and Daddy for weeks)

Anna needs to be the oldest developmentally. If Maggie is older too, that’s even better. (If the adoption takes 12-18 months then Maggie will be about 2 years old) Developmentally…. not age. Hailee is five, but has the needs and development of an infant. Is a small and delayed child very unusual or are many children so small?

We want to adopt somewhere where we feel like us adopting is not only needed, but where we feel there is an urgent need that needs to be met (and where there aren’t many called to fill the need).

We are stepping out in faith to adopt a child with special needs. Many types of special needs are feeling acceptable to us. We honestly don’t know. We are trusting God heavily on this and are confident that this is the direction He is leading us.

Currently, we’ve had Bulgaria suggested to us, because they have fairly short travel times (5 days in country for both parents, then home again, then 5 days in country with just one parent… possibly waived.). Their waiting children are usually 4 years old or older. Sooooo, we’ll see.

Let me share some questions that have come up that we’ve talked about. I won’t write all the answers, but the questions alone are interesting:

Can a child be too young to learn about compassion, about sacrifice, about patience, about generosity? (We decided that these are wonderful thing to learn, but like all things, should be learned at an age-appropriate level.)

Are we willing to make the sacrifices? (Having a young, needy, delayed child, less freedom, less personal time, less sleep) – The answer is yes. Not that sacrifices are fun. But we would have a hard time living with ourselves if we turned away from this need. God is calling us.

What time frame is logical, taking into account Maggie’s age, finances, and home upgrades? – We decided 9 months would be really tight and somewhere around 15 months would be ideal. 🙂

What changes need to be made around the home? – Make the office suitable for Maggie and Anna to have as a bedroom (close in stairway, install a new window?, build a bunk bed, put rails on the stairway and loft)

What are our short term expectations?
What are our long term expectations? (of adoption, of our child, of our other children, of where we’re living, etc.)

Etc!

And now, I need to tell everybody that my Dad and my brother-in-law, who are a construction-working-fiend-team came and built us a fence! Our back yard is now enclosed! And the fence is custom made pretty and perfect! I am really happy about it. I’m having a hard time not using a lot of exclamation marks. I don’t have enough pictures of it yet, but let me share a few.

Can you see the fence? Not really? Great! It’s there, but I wanted it to still be really open visually between our yard and our wonderful neighbors. We have a gate over there too. It’s not installed in the pictures, but it is up in real life.

A little closer, again without the gate up yet:

Pretty:

Dad fixing up the gate. Dad and Austin are for hire. Leave a comment or send me an email if you’re interested. They can do pretty much any construction work except building a house from the ground up. Experience and a desire for perfection and attractiveness (that’s my dad) and a handyman in his own right (that’s my brother) – they can do anything. They’ve even got a small tractor and they know how to use it. 🙂

I’m afraid that’s all the fence pictures I have for now.

The little helper:

Jackson and Maggie:

Early stages:

That’s my almost-walking girl!

Sis Melis’ is due in two weeks!

You should have seen her when she was holding the hose nozzle – she looked just like Super Woman!

Maggie and Papa:

The girls:

And one of my favorite photos in awhile:

Pre-walking videos: