From Russia with Love...

Last night we had the great privilege and pleasure of speaking to the Park Family who God so amazingly brought us together! They are very similar to us in so many respects and it was wonderful to hear them and their journey through this adoption process from such an honest and real perspective! Oddly enough they are just at the very end of their adoption from guess where....Russia! They are adopting a little boy and they themselves have 3 biological sons, their youngest is named...Ethan! HA! God has such a great sense of humor! They like us, are a young family too who also had children at a young age, so it was very refreshing for us to speak with them, there are not to many of us around who have kids in their young 20's anymore. They also like us are using America World as their agency and had great thing to say about them, so it was only a further confirmation that we have chosen the right agency to work with! Needless to way, we spent close to an hour and a half on the phone with them getting tons of useful information and really inspired us to get moving on all this! God really used them to speak to us on so many diffrent issues in regarding adoption. We really feel blessed to be in this position to grow our family like this! I know this is going to be a long and bumpy journey, but we are so excited and have all our faith in God to make it happen! Please keep us in prayer as we move forward. I'll be starting a list of where we are at in this process on the side panel so you can all keep up at where we are whats ahead! I also just spoke the Family Connections in Oceanside, and agency who does home studies, so we can get that started. The first step in that is attending an information session at the begging of next month.

Oh we also though it was pretty funny, they pointed out that we were suppoe to be in a small group with them over 2 years ago at Emmanual Faith but nthe group never really got off the ground at the time, but they remembered our name from that. Funny!

Clarity....

This last weekend I had the privilege of going to the Women’s Retreat with our church Mission Hills! It was some very much needed “me” time. It was also the first time I have every left Jacob, but no worries, Jeff and Ethan handled it like pro’s! Anyways, the retreat was awesome and I got to spend a lot of time getting to know some amazing women and made lots of new friends, but God also spoke to me quite a bit about our adoption process and thought I’d share what an incredible God we have.

First of all, as most of you who have read this know we are really at a stand still with “where” to adopt from. Sometimes the gigantic need in all parts of the world get to be very overwhelming for Jeff and I and we have such a hard time picking out one place. Its been difficult to know what direction God is leading us in and to be honest we have been a little distracted with trying to find a house lately too. Well Saturday night at the retreat it all kind of came together for me.
I realized that God is not a God of confusion or frustration or helplessness. I’ve been too distracted in worrying about making the right decisions that I have forgotten to let go and let God make the decisions for us. Jeff and I are very excited to be in this process and realize it’s not about picking the right country to adopt from, it’s choosing to listen and be obedient to what we have been called to do, even if that means waiting.
There is also some other wonderful news. Deirdre Close, the worship leader at our church was so awesome to pray with me about this whole process and put Jeff and I in touch with another young family she knows who have 3 boys of their own and are in the final stages of completing their adoption of a little boy from Russia and they live very close to us! They have already contacted us through email and we are waiting to set up a time to get together in person or over the phone hopefully this week! Very cool! More update to come in the next week or so!

The begining of our journey...

Well Jeff and I decided to start a blog and thought it would be a swell way to keep everyone up to date on how things are progressing! I’ll give a quick recap of what’s transpired already…

The Beginning of January…

Jeff and I start talking about having more kids, and talk about adoption as a possibility (we’ve talked about this for the last few years, but never really investigated it). We had a really great talk about the possibility of adopting and what kind of family we want to have years from now. We really felt like God was laying this opportunity on our hearts …we both have a really heavy heart for all the children in the world without parents. We wanted to take it very seriously so we spent quite a few weeks in prayer and investigating adoption agencies and procedures and all. We really had no idea where to start, so everything we found, we read. We (especially Jeff) researched everything, and really became interested in a few different organizations, so we sent away for information. We talked to some families from our church who had adopted and got their advice and input on where to start. The more we looked into it, the more fell in love with the idea of adoption. Although I can definitely say that along with the love there is also a lot of fear.

Now we had a better idea of how things work but still a lot of questions…domestic or international adoption? If International…what country? Boy or girl? What age? How are we going to pay for this? How do we explain to the boys about this? How to explain all this to our family?

It wasn’t too much longer we talked to our families about it and even Ethan and things were received well! After a lot of talk and prayer we felt really strongly about international adoption. I think we have both always felt a connection with kids and international ones at that, but the compassion for them was a little overwhelming between the both of us and there wasn’t much hesitation in determining that international was the way we wanted to go. The only question is where? Once we read though all the information, we have realized we are too young to adopt from China. Chinese laws require at least one parent be at least 30 years old. We began to narrow it down to 3 countries…Russia, Ukraine (Jeff is 1/8th Ukrainian), and Ethiopia.

The Beginning of February….


After much consideration we moved forward with American World Adoption Agency. We had an immediate connection with the agency and they sent us a DVD and we couldn’t watch it without crying. When we practically ran out of tissue in the house, we decided to take the next step and fill out the application and just see if we were even accepted by the agency, less that a week later I got a call from America World that we had been accepted! We were very excited and about a week later received a packet with all the next steps!

Since the middle of February we have hit a few little bumps in the road. The first being, that we finally decided to adopt from Ukraine and as soon as we came to the decision and talked to America World about it, we were disappointed to discover that Ukraine has put a cap on the number of adoption requests (also called a dossier) a year at 1400. As of the beginning of February they had already received over 1200. There is a huge risk in processing all the paperwork (which can take close to 3 months to complete if you do it in a hurry) and submitting it along with all the money and being because they have hit their quota and we lose all the time and money we put into it. With it being so very close to hitting the cap already, it is very discouraging. The other bump in the road is that Ukraine had also been referring families’ children over 5 years old. We really prefer to adopt a younger child as to not disrupt the birth order in our home. So that means adopting a child younger than Ethan and Jacob, which looks very unlikely at this point.

All that issues with Ukraine have lead us to believe that perhaps the Lord is not leading us to adopt from that country, or at least not at this time. So, we have carefully considered Russia. The one very big disadvantage Russia has is the cost of the adoption. The issue that tears us apart is….while it is very very expensive, how can you put a cost on a child…your child? You simply can’t. It breaks our heart to have to even consider not adopting from a particular country because of the cost, but we have to think realistically and it is way more expensive to adopt from there mostly due the whole process, which requires two trips to Russia. That means flying over there twice, once to chose our child, and then again 3 months later to bring him or her home. Combined, the trips together could equal 6-7 weeks long, which also mean 6-7 weeks off work. It’s a bit of a faith tester, but we are open to God’s plan. We know that this is God’s will for our family and are 110% confident He will provide all the tools and resources and patience we need to complete this.


The beginning of April…

The past few weeks we have been very busy and we have not made decisions as quickly as first thought. The past few weeks we have talked many times about Africa. All that is going on over there, the AIDS epidemic, the poverty, the gigantic numbers of parentless children…it’s very difficult to learn about and not feel compelled to adopt from that part of the world. To be really honest and raw here, I think Jeff and I are very overwhelmed by the abundant and spectacular need all over the world. It’s the most wonderful blessing to feel like we can make a difference in the lives of these children and yet a very discouraging one at the same time because saving just one doesn’t seem like enough.

I’ve gotten quite a few emails and calls from everyone asking where we are at in the process. As of today we are still in the stages of making a final decision on what county we should be adopting from. We currently have the paperwork filled out to begin our dossier for Russia and have the info we need to begin our home study too, all we need to do it send it in, but until we know for sure that Russia is the place, we are not sending it in. I guess if you are reading this, please pray that God leads us in the right direction and makes the choice clear for us what part of the world are next son or daughter is in.

Thank you all for thinking of us and being curious! It’s very exciting to know we have tons of friends and family on our side. We’ll be trying to keep this updated often so everyone can stay up to date on our journey!