I love this part...

One Tuesday morning, shortly after my 20 week scan with baby Donny, I was supposed to be somewhere but I just wanted to stay home. I grabbed a cup of tea, and sat down to read a post from my favorite blog. It was a post about seeing the beauty in someone for who they are, specifically in that post, about the beauty of a child with a cleft. The smiles in the photos truly were beautiful.

For the first time I saw a cleft lip as something beautiful. I saw the beauty in the smile even though it was different from our idea of perfect.

It wasn't even moments later that my phone rang. My midwife (an incredible woman who I was able to see with all three of my pregnancies) called to tell me that my baby was healthy, and a little boy. There was something else that we needed to know though, the ultrasound showed that he had a cleft lip.

Wow. I felt like God had prepared me for this moment. Oh how he loves us. I cried, I cried like any mother would when they learn that their child will need to feel pain. Surgery again. We had already been through one with Bud, and we were already preparing to go through it again with our adopted baby, but the reality of it still hurt. Our precious baby. Would I be able to nurse him? Would people make fun of him? What would surgery be like? Oh I felt so protective of this little one that we had not yet met. But I also laughed. Seriously? I had just been marveling over the beauty of a cleft smile only moments before! I had complete confidence that we could handle this. I was curious about this little boy that I could feel wiggling around inside of me.

When we got to see our little guy on his birth day, we felt so blessed, very prepared, and just incredibly head over heels in love. But who wouldn't be. He was adorable if I can say so myself!

Restless

In early 2012 I started feeling restless; searching for something more. I believe that many times, when this happens, there is something that God wants us to search for, or open our hearts to. This could be something very small, but sometimes something a little bigger, like moving to a new home, or a new job. This time I just couldn't shake the feeling of restlessness. I was very happy with my two precious babies, and we knew we wanted to have more children, but I started to believe that God had something planned for us in the next few years, I just didn't quite know what.

So I started reading, because really I do love a good book where I get a chance to learn something new. Two of the books that really stood out to me where "Anything" by Jennie Allen and "Interrupted" by Jen Hatmaker. Both of them are about saying yes to God, and committing your life to working to bring glory to him.

A side story in both of those books also happened to include adoption. Everywhere I looked it seemed adoption was coming up over and over again. Maybe when you start thinking about something you just are more aware of it, but I started to believe that maybe it was God bringing these to show me something. My heart started to break for the orphans, babies that didn't have someone to cuddle them when they cried, and did not have the security of a full belly, warm bed, and most of all a parents love. It wasn't something that Jake and I had previously really talked about or planned to do, but nor were we opposed to it. And when your heart starts breaking, well you just have to find a way to do something about it!

I really started sharing all of this with Jake, and while he tried to understand and feel the same way, adoption was not something he had ever seriously considered, and he (understandibly) needed time to think about it. I guess when your wife comes to you sobbing because there are children without family, and we can be that family, it can come across a little strong :)

I used what little wisdom I could muster and left the poor guy alone for a few months. Well, kinda alone. I prayed continuously that if adoption was truly what we were called to do, then Jake had to be on board too. Two months later Jake told me that he just couldnt stop thinking about adoption and maybe this was something we needed to look into.

Two minutes later I had is signed up to meet with different agencies. That's how I roll.

After our initial meetings we left feeling pretty dejected. Adoption is expensive, wait lists are long, and we didn't meet the age requirements for some of the countries. We didn't really know where to go from here. So I went back to researching. And praying.

After much researching and praying we felt like we had a lot more clarity. Special needs adoption seemed like the road we wanted to go down, and since we had experience with Bud's surgery, we started to believe that maybe that surgery was preparing us for this. Cleft lips and palates are what came up most in our research, something I had previously known nothing about. At the same time we really felt called to Asia. So we made our decision. We wanted to adopt a baby from somewhere in Asia, with a cleft lip/palate.

Our agency said the China Waiting Children's List was the best fit for us, but we would need to wait until we were thirty. And so our decision was made. We would wait. And while we waited we had a third biological child. I figured this waiting would also give me a lot of time to learn all I could about clefts. I just didn't realize exactly HOW much I would learn.

Once Upon a Time...

Our adoption story begins a ways back, over 5 years back actually. Our first baby was born with something called Metopic Craniosynostosis, which means one of the sutures making up his skull fused prematurely. The metopic suture goes right down the forehead. So little Bud had a ridge down his forehead, and his head would grow back more to compensate and allow for room for his brain to grow.

We were told he would need surgery at around 9 months old, and I prayed over and over for a miracle, I couldn't see how good could come out of it at the time, I couldn't see the whole story. Let me tell you, watching your baby go through surgery is horrible. Childhood illness of every kind is horrible. You just want it to be you, not them. It was an extremely stressful period for us.

(Some of these photos are not pretty, consider yourself warned.)

Here is his forehead before surgery:

And here he is post op. The swelling was the worst part, the surgeons (a neurosurgeon and plastic surgeon) completely rebuilt his forehead. What was once on the left side was taken over and put in on the right, and the same with the right. I still don't really understand exactly how they did it to be honest. And his skull to this day feels really great with dips and bumps, but his forehead looks incredible.

And we all survived it. Even more than survived. I would never want to go through that again, but I am so thankful for everything I learned from it. I learned about trust, I love this little guy so intensely, and as hard as it is to imagine, God loves him even more, and wants to give him hope and a great future. I learned that I am stronger than I thought, and I learned that no matter how much you don't want to eat when stressed its actually a really good idea!

A few years later, when Birdie was around a year old, Jake and I started to talk about adopting a child. I will share more about how we came to that decision another time, but when we would look back at Bud's surgery, and Bud as a little baby, our hearts were broken for babies that were born with medical conditions that were given up. Most of them we will never know why their parents came to that difficult decision. Maybe they were pressured by family, maybe they felt their child had a better chance receiving medical care as an orphan because the family was too poor to handle it. Maybe they were scared and just didn't know what else to do.My heart breaks for the mothers of these children, but it also breaks for these children.

We felt like we were being called to welcome one of these babies into our home. We already know how much love and joy our children give us, how much they teach us, and how much richer our lives are because of them, so we are very excited to add another little one to our family and have them be a part of our story, our adventure.

Let me introduce us...

Woohoo! My first official post.  Let me introduce a little about me & my family, and in the next few posts I will share bits of our story so far!

I am so very proud of my husband, he works really hard and has so many talents but some of his greatest are his heart for people, all people really, and his sense of humor. Laughter follows him.

These are my three babies. I am actually fairly private when it comes to the internet so I am choosing not to share their names. (I know, most people reading this already know them. But there is something about publishing them that I'm not comfortable with.) SO I will use their nick names. The little long haired baby is Donny. His sister is really into Doc Mcstuffins, and she started calling him Donny (Docs brother) and the name really suited him so it stuck. The middle guy is Bud, he's been called that by his sister for years. (notice a theme? it seems to be her that comes up with the nicknames around here!) and our little girl is Birdie. Her older brother called her that before she was born, and it stuck.

We are also currently on our journey to baby number four, and are excited (and a little impatient, because waiting is not my strong point). I'll be sharing more on our adoption journey in the next while. It has been such a great journey so far of trusting in God's timing and direction and it gets me really excited whenever I get to talk about it!


These incredible photos were taken by my sister http://www.rachelludwigphotography.com/blog/ she chose to stop photography to focus on her family but luckily for us we ARE her family!