How my thoughts have changed....

When we started on the adoption journey I wanted to grow our family, I wanted a baby and dreamed and dreamed about the day that the three of us could sit together and admire our new family member.  It was all about us having a baby, a bigger family.

Then we went to LSS training, heard stories, talked to adoptive parents and learned and thought much more about birth parents, birth grandparents, etc.  With our happiness, will of course come their sorrow.  If you know me, you know my heart, and their sorrow is so, so hard for me.

Recently, mostly due to this potential complicated situation, I've been thinking about the life we can provide our baby.  The unconditional love, safety, health care, family adventures, future, faith, extended family and friends.  Things that are givens to me, but many children don't have.  I hadn't spent much time thinking about us giving a "better" life to a child, although people have mentioned it to me many times.  I've had a hard time thinking that we can better care for a child than someone else, we're just average everyday people that can't seem to have more children.  Our journey to growing our family has been so very painful, but recently I really, truly am feeling like we're being called to do this for reasons other than our own selfishness of having more children.  I'm guessing that this piece is all part of the journey.

Holding our Baby

I was listening to the radio on the way to a conference in St. Cloud today. A song came on about a pregnant woman who found out that her baby girl would likely live less than a year, her doctor asked her what she wanted to do. The mother and father had the baby, they wanted to hold her hand and be a mom and dad as long as they could. My heart broke thinking of our sweet little boy that never had a chance to have his mommy and daddy hold him. It seems so unfair, for him to never feel our arms around him, to never have a chance at life. I hope he felt comforted in my belly, listening to my heart beat. I hope he knew that I loved him, waited for him and wanted him more than words could ever describe. So, the tears kept flowing and I was digging for Kleenex thinking about how absolutely ridiculous I must look to all of the other folks in traffic.

Then I thought about our future, and the day that our family finally grows, the joy we will feel when our baby is put into our arms....more and more tears fell...the overwhelming gratitude I will feel to our baby's birth mother and father for giving us the most incredible gift, the gift of life. Then I prayed that the birth mother and father that choose us are ok with tears, because there will surely be lots of them when we see and hold our baby for the first time. What an amazing day it will be.