July 17th 2008

We have begun an amazing and terrifying journey. Tim and I have felt that we are being called to adopt another child into our home. We have discussed adoption many times in the past with our desire to have a larger family however it was always something that we put into the back of our minds. God had a different plan for us there. On Fathers Day of this year we ran into a family we had not seen in a while who had adopted a special little girl from China recently. We visited for quite a while and their 2 daughters were just beautiful. Tim and I asked them a lot of questions about their own adoption and the experience. We parted then and promised to keep in touch and our family went about our celebration of fathers day. We all talked at lunch that day how we would all like to do that someday and that was that or so we thought. Somehow neither Tim or I could get the idea of adopting out of our minds. God was working in both of our hearts and we started discussing it more and more. We thought that we would like to adopt a little girl from China who had special needs that we could help her with. As you know our middle daughter Emily has multiple congenital heart defects and has had many open heart surgeries and that was what we were planning on, but with only being 1 year past Em's last surgery it still was a way off. Obviously God had different plans for us because less than 1 month later we could not stop thinking about it, had prayed about it and started to research all it entailed. We decided to go to an informational meeting presented by an agency here in Indiana Hand In Hand. They specialize in international adoptions and have a wonderful program called United in Hope for special needs children in Nanjing Orphanage. We went to the meeting on Tuesday and filled out our paperwork for the special needs we would be willing to accept on Thursday. I faxed it in from work at 2:00 in the afternoon and by 3 Pm I had an email titled I was Just Wondering from Vickie at the adoption agency. This is how God's plan became very clear to us both.