How It All Began

I have finally joined the world of blogging! I thought it was an appropriate time to start as Jeff and I are only 1 day away from traveling to Ethiopia to meet our children for the first time. We would love to share this journey with you all as we get ready to leave and hope to post as often as possible once in Ethiopia.

As we are so close to completing our adoption process and beginning our new life as a family of four, I thought I could share a little about how the whole process came about. Back in March 2007, Jeff out of the blue told me he had been researching International Adoption. I didn't quite know what this meant at first, but as he continued sharing his heart I realized that the Lord was speaking to Jeff about starting a family through adoption. I was blown away by this, especially because I thought that I would be the one initiating the adoption process! Jeff and I had always talked about adopting, but in my mind this was years in the future after we had biological children. I must tell you that at that point in my life I was not ready to have children, or so I thought. Many of my close girlfriends were pregnant and having babies and the baby bug never got me. I thought something must be wrong with me since I didn't want to get pregnant and have babies. However, I now know that this wasn't God's plan for us and our babies would be coming a different way. I was instantly on board when Jeff told me he thought we should adopt first.

So began our research on what country our children would come from. We eliminated some countries that we didn't qualify for (such as China, we are not old enough) Africa was never a country that I had considered adopting from, but as Jeff and I researched it more and more we both felt that this was exactly where we were suppose to go! We loved the culture and rich heritage that Ethiopia had. The people are absolutely beautiful and we just found ourselves falling in love with this country. We found an agency that has an amazing care center in Ethiopia and began the application process in May 2007. We completed and submitted all of the necessary paperwork in August and were then placed on the waiting list, requesting siblings under 4 years old. 9 months later (May 2008) we received the amazing news that we had a boy and a girl waiting for us. It's been about 3 months since then and we are absolutely thrilled to finally be on our way to meet these precious children and start our family.

We have so appreciated all of the love, support and prayers we have received from our family and friends. It is such an amazing feeling to know our children are already loved by so many. Thank you for sharing this journey with us.