I’m short. Just a fuzz over 5 feet to be exact.
So when I hit about 5 weeks gestation with this pregnancy (number 4!), my pants were already getting snug and we realized that we couldn’t keep it a secret for long.
Of course, family and friends were ecstatic, but announcing we were pregnant was all of the sudden like shining a flashlight on the elephant in the room.
But…uh… you’re adopting, right?
I know countless parents who have started the adoption process, only to find out a few months later that they were expecting a biological child; and some of those, like a college friend of mine, were told they’d never be able to have children!
People adopt for very personal reasons and each family has a beautiful and unique story, so I’ll try to explain ours.
Yes, we’re still adopting. This is baby number 4 of 5.
Now, to answer some of those unasked questions that you never know if you should ask adoptive parents:
No we didn’t get impatient and decide to just have another baby while we waited. Yes, we do know how babies are made. We knew that there was another missing piece of our family and this little one inside me fits into that empty slot.
In another post, I’ll be explaining a little more about why we are adopting from overseas. International adoption is a looooong process filled with fundraising and endless paper work. We are currently planning to adopt from Ethiopia and have started (and continue to run) our fundraising process. Finances are a major component that slow down the process, so we are fundraising and building our bank account before we even apply. We were on the financial track to begin the application process and home study sometime in the spring of 2015, and even though I’m pregnant, that hasn’t changed.
We are still adopting because our end goal wasn’t to end up with more children, or even to somehow remedy a singular case of social injustice and poverty. Our end goal in adopting is to bring home the little boy that God has called to be a part of our family.
For us, we knew that this little one that we’re expecting doesn’t fill that particular role…there’s a little boy somewhere across the ocean and that place in our family belongs to him.
This baby that’s growing inside me has his own unique, God-given space and calling. I’m realizing that as our family size grows, it’s not that my love for any of my children is being divided; but my capacity to love them all uniquely is multiplying.
So yes, I’m pregnant. Yes, we’re still continuing on in our adoption process. Yes, we need a bigger house. And yes, we are over-the-moon excited about what God is doing in and with our family!
Thanks for being part of our story!
get the word out:
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