I know it’s been a while since I posted an actual update on our baby journey. I know that for some – our journey has ended. Some see our decision to walk away from IVF as our choosing to give up on having children, which is not the case. Some people even made me feel as though I should stop writing… One person in particular told me that my posts “were so full of despair”…. which is funny… because I never thought that. In fact, (with the exception of my birthday post) I had always thought my writings were honest but always with encouragements to hope. It’s funny how differently we can all see things.

Honestly, a lot has happened in the past few months and I wasn’t quite ready to start sharing yet for a myriad of reasons. But over the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling God pushing me to start writing again, and in truth I’ve been working on this post for almost that long… It has had many revisions as I’ve been trying to find the right words, trying to figure out where to start. But I think I want to start with this:

You see Ryan and I believe there is beauty in brokenness. In fact, I have a sign up in my living room that says just that. And I regularly wear a necklace that says “Broken Things to Mend.” I believe that there is purpose in all things… even if we don’t always understand it at the time. I believe that sometimes we experience hardships, pain, loss, and difficult situations because God knows what the road ahead is going to be like for us, and He is helping prepare us for what is to come.

When I think back to the fire (that I talked about on Friday), sure – I remember the difficulty of that situation… but what I recall even more is what we gained. We learned that we were surrounded by amazing, loving and supportive people. We ended up with a beautiful new home. But even more than that – we learned that when we had nothing – we were strong… together. That has become our truth. Even if kids are not part of God’s picture for our life. If we never get to be called mommy or daddy. If we never get to watch our children grow and flourish into their own independent people. We will still be okay. Because we have each other. And we are strong together.

When I started sharing our journey with all of you, things always felt very linear. Like I went to the doctor and she put me on this drug. Or we had this test done and that means this is our only option. Or God sent us this sign. Very cause and effect stuff. It made it easy to share because I wrote about them as they happened. But life doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes God’s plans are not blatant, but subtly planted seeds carefully placed in our minds and hearts.

I cannot tell you an exact date for when the seed was first planted… but it was many, MANY months ago. It was just an idea at first. A little thought in the back of our minds. It first crept in sometime after my SIS procedure in January. Over time, as our journey began to unfold more and more, our path became more tumultuous, more obstacles arose and little signs came to light. I like to think that in January God softly whispered His hope for us into our hearts… and over time He got louder and louder until it was too persistent to deny any longer.

So here we are telling you once again that Ryan and I have decided to answer God’s call. After many months spent in prayer – we have begun the process of adopting. We are simultaneously excited, nervous, and somewhat overwhelmed with the road ahead. We know this road isn’t going to be easier. In fact, in a lot of ways it will be harder… But we truly believe that everything we’ve been through has been leading us towards this path. For us personally, this was not a decision made to fill our own desire to have kids because truthfully there are plenty of reasons adoption can be terrifying. But over the past several months we have received many signs and have felt God calling us to pursue adoption. So we are putting our faith in Him that the right child will find his/her way to us. I promise that in time I will share more of the details that have lead us to this point, but for now we wanted to let you know where we are at.

Back in July, after doing a great deal of research, we finally made the decision to move forward with Domestic Infant Adoption – adopting a newborn baby here in the United States. We are well into the process at this point having completed tons of paperwork and background checks, as well as being accepted by an adoption facilitator. We’ve also put together our own profile to share with birth moms as well as a website. Feel free to check it out at http://ryanandstephanieadopt.com. We still have our Home Study to complete and then we’ll waiting to be matched with a birth mom.

The one major obstacle we have yet to overcome is the expense. Adoption is unfortunately not cheap and despite how determined and independent we are – the truth is we can’t do this all on our own. We’re working out the details for some fundraisers – I’ve got a couple designs for potential t-shirt sales or Ryan loves the idea of doing a big cook. Someone suggested maybe doing a silent auction as well. I also contemplated doing a Christmas mini session too to raise the money. If one of those sounds like something you’d be interested in or if you have ideas – we’d love to hear them!

We will do our best to keep everyone updated on this new chapter in our journey. We are so thrilled to have your love and support while we’ve been struggling and we’re looking forward to sharing in this new journey with you too!

Lots of love from us to all of you!
Ryan and Stephanie