Adoption

We love adoption.  In fact, three of our five children have joined our family through adoption.

Adoption is a journey that doesn't stop when papers are signed and finalized.  It's a lifetime journey filled with challenges, love, confusion, hope, disappointment, fulfillment, and best of all...FAMILY!

Megan (now 15) was adopted when she was 3 months old.  Jeran (our second son, who was preemie by 6 weeks) was home from the hospital less than a week when we got a call about adopting Megan.  Tim and I both served missions for the LDS church in the Marshall Islands...and I must clarify that we served five years apart and didn't meet on our missions.  It was through a family we both knew there that we heard about Megan.  Our first response?  "We already have a baby."  (Yes, I really did say that.)

Obviously, we changed our minds.  The complications of pregnancy and delivery for me and for our two healthy babies had been enough that Tim and I had already decided Jeran was our last pregnancy.  We had rolled the dice twice, and even with all the risks and complications, we had been blessed with two healthy boys.  We would consider ourselves blessed, and call our family complete...

But did God have other plans for our family?  In the days following the phone call about Megan, Tim and I both at different times were feeling like we needed to adopt Megan.  We both freaked out a little, prayed, freaked out, and prayed again...and again...and again.

A few weeks and a lot of prayers later, Megan was home.

Fast forward 9 years...  During those years we had tried to adopt again, but things didn't ever work out. We were at peace with our three children and considered our lives blessed.  I went back to school, and was working as a counselor in mental health.  We thought we'd forever be the parents of three children, and we were completely ok with that.

We have a saying in our family that our adoptions are our unplanned pregnancies, and when Joie joined our family, it was certainly not what we would have ever planned as the course of our life or hers.  Joie is my niece, and on August 18, 2007, her family died in a car accident.  We, like so many other family members, were willing to have her in our family after the accident, and ultimately, she ended up here.  It meant the least amount of change for her, and both sets of grandparents felt comfortable with that decision.  We have been incredibly supported by family in that process, and love that we have been able to stay connected to both sides of Joie's extended family as she has been with us.  The Weavers and Caldwells have made us feel like one of them, something that made the impact of the loss a lot less on Joie, I'm sure.

We legally adopted Joie a few years after she was in our family.  I felt forever like we could never take the place of her family, but it made sense legally.  She was being raised in our family, with our children.  She didn't have another family.  She wanted to fit in, and not have a different last name.  Eventually, my heart got to where I knew this girl needed a family...mom, dad, brothers and sisters...   No one should go through life without  that.

About three years after bringing Joie into our family, we were all feeling the peace of having "gotten through" a really difficult time.  Joie was doing well, and we had settled back into life again.  Then one calm day Tim suggested adopting again.  I told him he was crazy.  I had that don't-rock-the-boat feeling.  Things were going well.

But once that thought was out there, the mom in me started thinking, "What if?"  I thought about how, when we had adopted Megan, we had never intended for her to be the only adopted member of our family, but other plans hadn't worked out.  Then Joie came along, but definitely not in a way anyone ever plans on adding to their family.

We certainly weren't thinking of adopting a baby.  We were happy with where we were at in parenting and starting over at baby age didn't really sound fun.  (Why do diapers, bottles, and pull all nighters if there are kids out there who need a family who already sleep through the night, right?)  We could no longer really wonder what it would be like to bring an older child into our family.  We'd already done that, and done it pretty successfully under some difficult circumstances...

And so the idea of child number 5 was born.  Only a few days after deciding to go ahead and look into adoption again, I got an email from an agency with a waiting child list attached.  Under Gabby's profile was a description of her and her needs, which included, "needs a family who understands grief, loss and trauma."  Yes, we knew a little about that...

I called, and the rest is history.  A few months later, Gabby was in our home...the first of our "planned" adoptions.  What an amazing, healing journey adopting her has been.  There was a lot of peace and satisfaction in moving from a place of such profound loss to a place where we felt confident in moving forward with life in a way we had always planned.

And Gabby...  Gabby is just Gabby.  There's no way to describe her.  We love, love, love the life and personality this girl brings into our home, and can't begin to imagine life before her.  We have also walked the path of loss with her.  Her life hasn't been easy, but we're happy we get to share in the joy of this wonderful being who understand the reality of her loss, and still chooses to live, love and trust enough to call us her family.  We have been blessed.

Who knew?  Definitely not us.  We could never have predicted this path for our lives, but at the same time we wouldn't want to be anywhere but here.  Our family life is a journey of a lot of "broken roads" intersecting into one where we are blessed to be able to walk together for a while...hopefully forever.

Read more about our adoption journey here.