Since my third son Joshua is about to turn 18 months next week, I decided I would share the story of his adoption. I get a lot of questions about his adoption and adoption in general, I will try to answer as many of them as I can. I have a felling this might be a two-part post. lol.

So, our journey to adoption was one that started with me being adopted at 2 months old. I always felt very blessed by my adoption and thought when I grew up I would like to adopt. Glenn and I got married and we discussed adoption. He also had considered adoption after visitng an orphanage in Brazil as a child.

We got married, and then got pregnant with Samuel. And then along came Jordan two years later. We talked about adoption here and there, but just said that it was something we would do “someday”. When Jordan was almost 2 we decided to get pregnant again. That pregnancy ended with a second trimester miscarriage. It’s was very devastating to us. But God brought healing to our lives and a year later we got pregnant again. We again, lost another baby. We had decided that if we lost another baby we would pursue adoption. Neither one of us had the heart to go through another pregnancy at the time and we knew there were so many children who needed good homes. So, we began our paperwork process with Bethany Christian Services in August of 2009. It took us until January of 2010 to finish the paperwork and be a “waiting” family. With adoption you just never know how long that wait will be. It could be a week or 5 years, you just don’t know. There is a lot of emotional ups and downs with adoption. With pregnancy it’s mostly physically draining, but with adoption it’s more emotionally draining. So, a week after we were “waiting” we got a call from our social worker about twins that had just been born. The birth mother was looking at two families to take the children, us and one other family. We waited 24 hours for her to make her decision. I prayed a lot during that time. And ultimately she decided on the other family. It was hard, but I knew God had a baby out there for us. All through January and February we got 5 other calls like that one. Children who were available but for one reason or another we weren’t chosen. All of them were girls. I was convinced God would give us a girl, even though we were open either a boy or a girl.

On March 26th, I was doing some housework and my social worker called. I went into the bathroom and locked the door so I could have a conversation with her without the boys interrupting me. (All of you moms know what I mean). So, our social worker had called to say that there was an 8 day old baby boy in NICU who had been born prematurely and needed a home. The birth mother had chosen us and she wanted to know if we were interested. To be honest, all I heard was the word “boy”. The NICU and premature didn’t phase me, just “boy”. I began having a conversation with God while still talking to the social worker and it went something like this:

me: “God, I just knew you were going to give us a girl. This is a boy, this can’t be the child you want for us”.

God:”This is your child”

me: “okay, God, but I am still not convinced”

So, I got off the phone with the social worker after having told her I would talk to Glenn about it and call her back. I called Glenn at work and he didn’t answer. I called and called and left emails, but he was in a meeting and couldn’t be reached. So, the social worker called me back a couple of hours later and I told her I couldn’t talk to Glenn. She said, well the birth mother is leaving the hospital and needs to sign the paperwork and they need an answer right now. So, I said  “yes”, because God had told me to. I then left Glenn another message on this cell phone. He finally called me back and I told him we had a boy at the hospital waiting for us to visit him that night.

We went to the hospital that night and saw Joshua for the first time. I was very shocked by all the hospital stuff. NICU is a scary place. Joshua was in an isolette and had wires and tubes everywhere on him. He was wearing just a diaper. You couldn’t even see what his face looked like because it was covered with an oxygen mask. He was tiny! Only 2lbs 11oz. and 15 inches long. You could see through his skin because he was only 29 weeks along when he was born and babies that small haven’t developed all the layers of skin yet. He didn’t move but you could see him breathing. His little eyes were closed. The nurses were so happy to see us and we were somewhat of instant celebrities. They had never had a child adopted from NICU. In fact, we are the first in our adoption agency’s history to ever adopt a child that premature. When I walked in and saw him laying there, so helpless and having no one in the world, I knew I couldn’t walk away from him. He needed us. And that was our goal in adoption, was to adopt a child who needed us.

If we had only known what a journey lie ahead of us….