A Cookie Surprise

homemade fortune cookies!

Get in my belly!

I came home friday to a box on the back porch from none other than Julie.  I was so excited I could barely wait for Jonathan to get home so we could open it together.  Not only was this such an uplifting and thoughtful gift but it was tasty too!  You can't tell from the pictures but these cookies are the size of a fist.

Her fortunes were hilarious!  My favorite one referenced our child being a
show choir prodigy but I don't think Jonathan was as amused :)

Julie and her family hold a special place in our hearts.  They have been a role model in our lives.  Julie and her sister were adopted from Korea as babies.  Dennis & Jan (mom & dad) have always been a couple that we look up to and have wanted to grow up to be like.  Seeing the home and love that they have provided for their adopted daughters really helped us to know that we would want to adopt one day.  We recently learned that they also used Bethany, which was a major encouragement.

Thank you Dennis, Jan & Julie for showing us that a family formed through adoption can be filled with just as much love as a family formed through birth.  

Moses

Here is a little insight into the title of our blog, referencing Moses.

Exodus 1:22- 2:3

Then Pharoah gave this order to all his people; "Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live." Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son.  When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch.  Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.

I love the image of drawing a child out of the reeds and giving it a home and opportunities it might otherwise not have had.  Moses' mother valued her son and his life and chose to keep him alive.  We know we will get a birth mother that feels the same.  She will place her child into our arms and know that we will give him or her a happy home and a life full of love.

Applications Sent

Well we sent off our loan application to America's christian credit union and formal application to Bethany.  Its a little scary to be committing to Bethany before we have our loan approved, but I'm pretty confident we'll get it.  We're going for a home equity adoption loan.  And if we don't get it, we'll just have to try for a regular adoption loan because we cannot wait any longer for a baby!

Filling out the formal application for Bethany was a bit more work than I thought it would be.  We had to go downtown to the jail and get fingerprinted, fill out LOTS of paperwork and complete a long form through the Bethany website.  We pounded out a lot of the paperwork at Alterra one night last week to make it more of an exciting event.

look at me, hard at work!

Once our formal application is accepted we'll have to fill out way more paperwork and begin the home study process.  I'm actually pretty excited for it!  Our caseworker, Heather, is really nice and sweet so I'm sure she'll make it as painless as possible.  We have one-on-one interviews with her and then obviously the interview at our house.  After that is all wrapped up we fill out our profile for prospective mothers to see and create a web profile.  And we are officially on the wait list!  The average wait time from when you are officially waiting to be matched to when the birth parents give up their rights (usually when the child is a couple weeks old) is 17 months.  So we have a long wait in front of us.  But thats okay because at the end of it we know we'll have our baby :)

An unexpected journey

We are going to adopt!

As some of you may or may not know, Jonathan and I have been trying to have a baby for the past 2 years.  It has been a struggle to get through month after month of disappointment.  After going to the doctor and doing various tests and procedures to make sure everything is working correctly we found that there is nothing wrong with me.  Given the chance to do further infertility treatments we decided that based on our very pro-life stance that they were not for us.  We feel that we are following God's path and living our life according to His will.  And we are confident that He will reward us with a family.

And we feel that our family is meant to grow through adoption.  I feel so confident and content in this decision.  I feel I have mourned the loss of that time when you're pregnant, giving birth and then having that one-on-one time with your newborn.  But I will gain an experience that many people will never have.  Going through the adoption process will most definitely be stressful, long and heartbreaking at times, but it will also be extremely rewarding.  I wanted to record our experience to be able to look back on it and possibly help others who are considering or pursuing adoption.  Please feel free to comment with any questions and I'll answer to the best of my ability.

We are currently in the process of submitting our formal application to Bethany Christian Services for an infant domestic adoption.  We are also in the process of applying for our adoption loan, which currently has me stressed out!  I'll write more soon about the specifics of this, so be sure to check back on our progress.

We're excited to share our journey with you!

Love,
Jonathan & Katie