Our Adoption Journey

I know that most people reading this already know our story, but I have wanted to put it all in one place for quite awhile now. Hence this post.

When Dan and I had been married 2 years, we decided we were ready to start a family. 20 months later I finally became pregnant, and we were blessed with our Tyler. I had just met with my obgyn to discuss infertility issues, but we hadn't done more than a round of blood work, when I got pregnant.

Knowing that it took a long time to get pregnant the first time around, when Tyler was 18 months we decided to start trying again. Well, 2 years and 2 moves later we finally met with a Reproductive Endocrinologist who could find nothing wrong with either of us. My official diagnosis was unexplained infertility and my options were to try IVF or wait and see.

We hesitated to try IVF due to some of my health issues, and opted instead to wait and see (after all, it happened once). This was in the summer of 2007. It was at this same time that we started looking into adoption.

Once we decided to begin the adoption process, it took several months to get our file complete. We began with LDS Family Services, a great resource for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We got approval through them, and shortly thereafter (May 2008) were chosen by a birthmother. Unfortunately, she changed her mind just before the baby was born.

At the time I was devastated. This was something good, something we wanted for a very long time, and I didn't understand why we didn't get it. Throughout the experience I have had to learn to not only trust God, but trust his time table as well. The only thing that got me through was to realize that when it was time for our baby to join our family, he would find his way to us. (All along, I felt we would be adopting a boy.)

After several more months, we began to wonder if we should keep on this path. Then one day, in the fall of 2008, my mom called. It was one of those friend of a friend situations, and she gave us the name of a private agency in Utah. We felt they were an answer to our prayers. We liked LDSFS, but unfortunately it is hard to be placed with them simply because there are so many people that want to adopt and few babies to place. We thought this was a great way to increase our chances of being chosen.

We were approved by the new agency in January 2009. We were chosen by a birthmother in February, and yet again experienced a failed adoption.

Finally, comes June 2009. By this time we had been waiting 4 years to add to our family. We got a call from the agency asking if they could show our profile to a birthmom pregnant with twins. We agreed. (As a note, if we hadn't experienced that second failed adoption, I don't know if we would have agreed to twins. We had already paid our fee to the agency, and so it wasn't so overwhelming to come up with the twin fee. If we had to come up with the twin fee all at once, I don't know that we could have. I have to believe that everything happens for a reason.)

We felt so strongly that this was our time. These boys were meant to come to us. We sweated and prayed all weekend long though as the birthmother made her decision. Finally we got word, she had chosen us. The agency called us on Friday, she gave birth Saturday, we flew out to Utah on Sunday, and we met our sweet babies on Monday.

After one month in the NICU, we brought the babies home to Texas and have loved on them since. The adoption was made final December 21, 2009.

I don't have the answers to everything, but I do find it interesting to look back out our journey and have some insight as to why things happened. To get our path to cross with the babies, to have the timing of things line up, to get our finances to fall into place, everything just came together at the right time. At the time, every setback felt like the end of the world, but was actually just a fork in a path that was leading us to the end goal. I am so glad we finally got there.