We're Expecting!

What?!?  Yes, that's right......




We are expecting...




but we are not pregnant... 




We are very excited and pleased to announce after lots of prayer, that we are adopting from China.  What?!?  Did you say China?  Yep, you read that right.  We are very thankful that we have been pre-approved to adopt a 11 month old little girl from China. We couldn't be happier to be enlarging our family through adoption. God placed it on our heart that we should adopt even before we were married.  So we are quite pleased to be following through with that desire at this time with this child. 

So you might be wondering why we decided to adopt from China.  Well, that is a great question and the answer is we didn't originally start the process with China.  We had begun the process with another agency and were hoping to adopt from Ethiopia.  Just before we were prepared to submit our dossier (think our life story compressed to 50 pages or less), we felt like God told us to wait.  So we waited and kept praying.  About a week later the Ethiopian government announced some very strict changes to the adoption program that made the wait time uncertain.  We didn't know what to do.  They couldn't tell us if the wait time would be 18 months, or 5 years, or anywhere in between.  We continued to wait and pray for about a month, until we felt like God told us to start looking at adopting a child with special needs from China.  So we started praying about that and talking to friends who are adopting from China as well right now.  Lets just say that one thing led to another and we found ourselves looking at the file of a 10 month old little girl in China.  After lots of prayer and consulting with our pediatrician, we felt like she was our girl.  So we emailed our new adoption agency back and said we wanted to make her ours.  We are still hoping to eventually adopt from Ethiopia (or another African country) in the future, God willing.

That all happened just over two weeks ago.  On Friday, we received the official word that we had been pre-approved to adopt her.  So now the paper chase has begun!  We will be working to quickly move through the required paperwork and red tape to bring our little girl home.  As we said, we are super excited!!

We would appreciate your prayers for us as we begin this hopefully fast paced journey to bring our little girl home. If you would like to be added to know more specific ways to pray for us or would like to help in some way, please leave a comment and we will get back to you. We are going to attempt to update this blog more regularly with both adoption and family news.  If we slack off, feel free to leave us a gentle reminder in the comment section.  

A new blog and a new adventure...we suggest you stay tuned, its going to be a wild ride!

Our daughter at 9 months of age