Getting Up to Speed

Okay, so again, I'm a slacker about posting. But we have BIG news! We are amazed at how God works and how He answers prayers! There is a lot of background to this story, but to save you some suspense I will tell you the news first and then explain. The news is........We have started the adoption process!!!!

As many of you know, our journey to starting a family has not been an easy one. We have been on a long break from fertility treatments since our last IVF cycle. This is where the story begins. We have always felt that we would adopt even prior to getting married. Both of us feel particularly inclined to adopt internationally, and even more specifically, from an asian country. Our fertility journey actually spawned from our initial inquiries into international adoption. I will spare you the details on that starting journey, and of course, you know the fertility journey.

Back in January, we began feeling led to start looking at the next steps for starting a family. We have 2 frozen embryos from our last IVF cycle and felt it was only logical to pursue implanting them. However, we knew we wanted to seek a second opinion and we did that with a doctor in St.Louis. That visit did NOT go well. We left confused, discouraged, and frustrated. After a couple days to process we figured out why. The physician's view of our embryos and our view of our embryos did not line up. And yet we did not feel led to seek another opinion just yet, or who that would be.

At the end of that week we were headed to Joplin to meet with our financial planner and were planning on staying with Chris's parents the night before. We went to dinner with them that evening. After explaining our doctor's visit, they had this news to share with us. There is a couple at their church who has been praying for us throughout our fertility process and had themselves struggled with infertility. Chris's parents spoke with them the Sunday before our visit and they asked how we were doing. Then they suggested to his parents that when and if we were ready to adopt, they would love to talk with us about their adoption through a missionary couple running an orphanage in Taiwan. Some details were shared about cost and how they knew the missionary couple, etc. At dinner, his parents relayed the info and Chris and I just looked at each other..... If all of this was true, it was exactly what we had been praying for! We felt that if adoption was our next step that God wanted us to pursue, it would have to be something that basically found us. Our international adoption dreams, specifically asian, had just been placed in our laps!

Since then, we have been emailing the couple in Taiwan at the orphanage and felt led to pursue adoption through them. We started our home study process on this past Thursday and mailed a ton of application stuff off today! We are excited and looking forward to seeing the unfolding of our family! Everything so far seems to just be falling into place. It is impossible to imagine how this could possibly have happened without the hand of God. So we will follow!

We will try to do our best at updating the blog as more info and news comes in. Please pray for our process and the child God is preparing for us right now!

Blessings,
Amy and Chris