Our Love of Adoption

Adoption is something near and dear to our hearts. Even before Mike and I were married, and we were talking about the children we would have, we talked about how after two or three, that we would look into adopting a child. How naive and young we were. When Lilly was born, I knew that I needed to be a Mom again. I knew that the joy she brought into my life would be magnified with every child. When she passed away, I told Mike that we needed to consider having another (and soon!) When Ryker was born, and with everything we faced with him, and after he passed, our hearts were broken. I did not think they could ever really heal again. I knew for sure that I still wanted to be a Mom and Mike was unified in our desire to be parents. What I did not share is our journey to get where we are today. I pumped the whole seven weeks after Ryker was born. Subsequently, I think my body was a mess (between the pumping and my two c-sections in less than a year) my body changed. I was able to get pregnant so easily with Lilly and Ryker, so it really threw me for loop when we were all of a sudden dealing with really unexplained infertility. After "trying" for 2-3 months, we decided that maybe we should look into adoption. We sat on the fence for a few weeks, and than we were approached the birth mother we were supposed to adopt from. It pushed us off the fence, and we got our paperwork into LDS family services. During this time, the birth mother that we were going to adopt from decided to parent. It broke our hearts. During the time we were putting in our adoption paperwork, we decided to not try to get pregnant. After everything was in, we decided we would continue to try to get pregnant. There were some frustrating months, being frustrated with adoption and failed attempts to get pregnant. Some months, we would just not even try. (By the way, infertility is VERY hard!) It was hard having friend and family members get pregnant when our arms were so empty. We continued to feel such a pull to put our effort into adoption. I can not go into our little Champ's story quite yet, but someday I will. I just really feel that our un-explained infertility was because our Champ WAS supposed to come into our home. Had we not lost Lilly or Ryker, we would not have our Champ in our home. Things truly do happen for a reason. We will forever be grateful that our birthmom chose us and things worked out that Champ can be ours. Our next step is waiting 5 more months to be able to finalize the adoption. It will be a wonderful week, when that does happen (we are hoping sometime in October!) But for now, we just enjoy our sweet guy!
*Just wanted to say congrats to my best friend and her hubby on their arrival of sweet little Xander! He truly is a miracle (how many baby boys do you know that are born at 33 weeks and do not even need oxygen?!) So keep them in your prayers, because Abby is still pretty sick (Xander is actually doing better than she is.) It is kind of scary on her end, because she is one of the sickest Moms I have ever seen (and I see a lot of Moms in my profession!)
**Also, I just wanted to help some of our friends that are hoping to adopt. Spreading the news is MAJOR when it comes to adoption, and since we have had some awesome friends that helped spread the word for us, we would like to pay it forward. So you can e-mail us with a button or your story/info/ picture and we will do our little part to spread the word for you!