We have a HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT! That's right, this is THE announcement!
Yesterday we received word that we were officially committed to a child!
As most of you know, we were planning on going the referral route for this adoption, which meant a 2-5 year process. If you have followed the blog, you know that last month, no matches were currently available and this lead to much heartache. We continued to pray and felt that God was nudging us to trust Him even more with our checklist "selections". So we increased our age range. Still no match.
At that point, I just decided to just rest in God's timing. I knew that we couldn't rush what He had planned and knew that He would send us a match in His time, even if it wasn't what I wanted.
Almost two weeks ago, I checked the waiting list (which is something I had not been keeping up with since we were praying for a match from our list). One picture stopped me dead in my tracks. I called the hubs immediately and told him I knew I wanted to pull a medical file. He agreed without even seeing the picture. Of course I missed our agency closing by about 3 minutes. So we waited. All. Weekend.
In hindsight this was best, because we were able to pray without the pressure of seeing everything in this sweet kiddo's file. Our Pastor asked us on Sunday if there had been any progress in the adoption, to which the hubs replied, "Actually, we've been meaning to talk to you about something..."
I called our social worker first thing Monday morning and she sent over the file. I think despite all of the fear, we knew immediately this child was ours. We prayed and laughed and cried over all of the information we had. (Side note- if you ever plan on adoption for your family, just prepared that the words emotional roller coaster don't even begin to scratch the surface of this process. Totally worth every minute though.) We had an adoption medical specialist review the files and sat down with our Pastor that Wednesday. We told him everything, all of our feelings, fears, and all of the ways God had confirmed what we were thinking. He rejoiced with us as we surrendered to what we all knew was the Father's will. I told him that I expected God to give us peace with the right decision, but I never expected the pure JOY that would come with knowing we were going to be the parents of this child. The emotions are simply overwhelming.
The next step was to sign what are called "commitment papers", which basically tell our kiddo's country that we want to commit to this child and to please match us with him/her while we finish our paperwork. We were told it would take 1-2 weeks to hear back. We heard back 3 business days later. The morning of our wedding anniversary, we received the best call from our social worker: We were matched!
So now we are a family of 4! There is a precious kiddo waiting for us on the other side of the world, and we can't wait to get there! We were told that a good estimate of our first trip would be around March. So hopefully by this spring, we will be together for a week and a few months later we will all be together at HOME!
We have not told family and friends the gender and specifics about our kiddo yet. We are planning on having a reveal party this weekend so everyone can see this sweet face together!
So there you have it, folks! There will be more stories to tell in the coming weeks. This is such a condensed story, you won't even believe all of the things God has done in this process! After all of the details are revealed, I hope to type some of it out. Our Father is perfect and has orchestrated this adoption from the beginning, long before we started this adoption journey. I still have a hard time believing how many intricate pieces of this puzzle He has been putting together for YEARS. Y'all HE IS GOOD. He is so good.
