The Story of Us

As we began and now are in the full swing of this adoption, I thought I’d take a step back and explain just how all of this came about for those of you that don’t know.

A year ago May we felt led to foster.  The training and paperwork went so quickly that we were licensed by the middle of July.  We got a few calls in the fall for placements and said yes but then they either didn't get removed or they gave them to another foster family.  Also in the fall White's (our agency) had sent out a letter about the state changing things and that we might want to pick a specialty and we prayed and decided that medically fragile children were tugging at our hearts.  We had no medical training so we thought the first thing to do would be to go to the White's medically fragile training which was only being offered in the beginning of December.  Well, the lady who was teaching it got very ill and they canceled all of them.  Then at our foster Christmas party one of the specialists told us about a special little girl and that she may need a home and we told her to submit our home study. She also told us another family where the mom was a nurse was submitting theirs too and we were not shocked when they did not pick us nor were we upset because it was only logical and their home was definitely the best place for her.  Also at that time, my friend Amanda from MI got engaged and planned an April wedding.  I ended up spending every other weekend from January through April in MI helping her plan her wedding and kept thinking "how would I have ever done this if they had placed this little girl with us at Christmas?"  We had prayed and prayed that God would bring us a child at the right time but that if we didn't have one by May that we would wait until we got back from Mexico to accept a placement because we didn't want to take a child then leave them right away.  Well, no joke, Katie (another specialist) called to ask us to do respite for this little one over Memorial weekend the week I was leaving to go up for the actual wedding.  We prayed every morning that God would show us his will and how we would fit in to this little one’s life whether we would just always respite for families that had medically fragile children since it seems the state is pretty picky on who can do that, or whether He would give us our own child to love.  Well, then when the foster mom dropped her off to us we found out that she is due with a new baby the end of July and also has three other little ones at home.  We had our little cutie all weekend and absolutely fell in love with her.  We knew that her current foster home loves her so much but that it might be a lot for them to keep her with the new baby coming so we decided to offer to them that we felt God leading us to adopt her.  After careful consideration on their part, they decided this would be best for them as well.  I couldn't believe that the timing would work out that amazingly that God would provide her right after we got done with the other work He had for us to do.  So to make this LONG story short, I feel like He placed her with her current foster parents in such an amazing way with such a great purpose and now He is doing the same for us.

(I did cut and paste this from an email I wrote to her current foster mom because I just had to share the AMAZING way God placed her in our lives)