Guest post!

While I'm off filling my heart with little brown faces, I asked my friend Chrissy to blog in my stead. God gave her a pretty great story that I thought you bloggees would love. Click on over to her blog once you hear her cliff notes here. She's a great writer and I'm LOVING her entries over the last month!

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I didn’t think it was going to happen.
I figured I missed a sign somewhere along the line. Maybe God wasn’t really calling us to adopt. Maybe it was just me wanting to be a hero, do something “big”….
In the fall of 2006, I convinced my Man to attend an “If You Were Mine” adoption conference, sponsored by Family Life. He thought I was nuts (and rightfully so) but went with me anyway. I had decided when I was a teenager that I wanted to be a foster parent, take in babies and love them forever. My husband didn’t necessarily feel the same way. At first. He had all sorts of concerns. Finances. Birth parents rights. Finances. But he humored me and went along.
He left the conference more excited than I was.

We decided on the way home from the conference that we would adopt internationally. That a domestic adoption or one through foster care was just too risky.
A few months later we applied to an adoption agency. We started the home study process. We chose a country in Central America. We started raising money. We made payments. We turned in our homestudy. We were about done with our dossier.
And the country shut it’s doors to foreign adoptions.

Yup. It did. So now what? Our agency offered to transfer our money and paperwork to another country. This time in Africa.

We got back to work. More fingerprints, more paperwork, more home studies.
Missed a deadline (through no fault of our own) for our application at immigration services.

And we were told that we would have to start the process all over again.

I was devastated.

We took some time away from the situation. It was so painful. And so hard to understand. Here we were, a great family (at least I think so) that really just wanted to provide a home for a little girl. Nothing more. And I didn’t understand why all these roadblocks kept being thrown in front of us.
And quite frankly, I was mad.

Meanwhile, our neighbor across the street had adopted two little boys from Russia and she recommended that I talk to her social worker.

What a gift. This new social worker gave us SUCH hope.
We had her redo our home study for a domestic adoption. We filled out MORE paper work. And waited.

And waited.

And waited. Still rather fearful of a domestic adoption….but really not knowing what else to do at this point. We also knew that we were out of money. And that we really, really couldn’t afford to pay for an adoption. But we pressed on.
Almost a year later we still hadn’t been chosen by any birth moms. Our SW suggested that we do the foster parenting classes. You know…that one thing we did NOT want to do? Yeah….but we did them anyway.

And we fell in love.

Fast forward a bit here….we finished the classes in November, got our license in late December....and finally, FINALLY, we got the call on May 3rd.

I describe that day in great detail on my blog but let’s just say it is a day I will NEVER forget.

And now, I am typing this story in the room next door to where my beautiful 9 month old TWIN babies are sleeping.

We started out just wanting to adopt a girl. We got so discouraged that we questioned our calling to begin with. Waited 3 ½ years…and then got “our baby girl and bonus boy”.
In the words of my 11 year old…”that’s just ridonkulous.”