Details...Part 1 :)

Yes, we have a sweet, beautiful, new little person in our family. She is amazing! We are overwhelmingly thankful to God for our newest blessing. I have been reminded of the verse at the top of our blog numerous times in these past couple of weeks: "From the fullness of His grace, we have received one blessing after another." John 1:16 Amen! God's grace abounds...and our FIVE sweet children are the biggest of the amazing blessings He's bestowed on us.

So...to fill in a few of the blanks.

We actually started to pursue another Ethiopian adoption about a year ago. We were on the "waiting list" and everything. Then one thing after another started happening...first it was the new 2-trip policy. We would be required to travel to Ethiopia twice to complete the adoption there. While not ideal, we decided that was do-able. We stuck with it. Then the projected wait times for a referral with our agency started gettting longer and longer. When we joined the wait list, it was a 6-9 month wait for a referral (your "match"). Then it was 9-12 months. Then it was over 12 months, with no guarantees of how long. We had a conversation with our social worker about our options. In the most loving way possible, she told us what a great need there was for families for minority children here in the US. We decided to think about it, pray about it, and see what direction we should go. We already had a decent amount of money invested in the Ethiopian adoption--enough to make us keep going in that direction, knowing that making a change with regard to where we would adopt from would likely mean a total loss of that money.

I started researching different domestic agencies...a completely new thing for us. We had never considered domestic adoption, mostly because of the mistaken belief that there were crazy long waiting lists for healthy babies. That babies born here didn't ever have problems finding families. Not true, friends. The more I looked into it, the more need I discovered right here in the United States.

Through what I believe to be God's leading, I found Faithful Adoption Consultants through reading the blog of an acquaintance. I called Courtney the next day. We had a wonderful, long conversation and she and I clicked immediately. I wanted to hire her on the spot! But again, there was that money thing...we kept praying, we kept waiting, and all the while I was getting more and more excited about the prospect of adopting 1) a newborn and 2) a baby whose first family we could potentially have an ongoing relationship with. The first time we adopted, we didn't fully realize or grasp the huge importance of developing and maintaining a relationship with our child's birth family. While we were able to meet some of Zoe's birth family (and what a God-given gift that was!!), knowing for sure that they are receiving our updates on Zoe is uncertain, and we wish that they had some way to communicate with us. Bottom line, God was definitely changing my heart about adopting domestically and we began to think that maybe "our child" was right here in the US. And as a wonderful side note, this all was happening right about the time that our birth mom was contacting the agency that we eventually were matched with. God's timing is perfect, always perfect.

Moving forward to September. The kids were in school and it finally felt like the right time to make a move. We officially put our Ethiopian adoption on hold. Oh...what do you know? Miss Selah Faith just started fussing. :) I guess that means it's the right place to pause this long detailed explanation. More tomorrow...