What a Difference a Year Makes.....

 On January 11th 2021, our first daughter was born and placed in our arms. I start that sentence in that way because our second daughter was born December 19th 2021. WHAT?!?! 2021 was a year of blessings that cannot be measured for my wife and I. We went into the year expecting to start our family but we did not think that before the new year we would be the parents of two biological sisters born less than 12 months apart. Our family went from two to four in the blink of an eye and the last year has been an adjustment to the dream we always wanted to come true. A dream that has equated to a lot less sleep but a lot more love than I could ever have imagined.

So here is a quick rundown of the last year. 7:01PM January 11th 2021, yes the same day as my last post, we get a call that our birth mother is in labor. We race to meet her at the hospital and our daughters was born at 7:21PM. I held her in my arms about an hour later for the first time and she has had my heart every since. After spending three months on leave bonding and loving on her we started to settle into our new normal of daycare, work, weekends, and life. In April or May we had been told that our birth mother had contacted the agency for assistance stating she was pregnant but was planning on parenting at that time, so we just set it in the back of our mind and went on with our new normal. Jump to September and we get a call from our adoption counselor and she lets us know not only was our daughters birth mother pregnant and due in December but she wants to place with us so her kiddos can grow up together. We spend the next few months on edge getting things ready and early in the morning on December 2019 we receive a series of calls that our second daughter was born that morning. We met her the next day and have been with her ever since.

We always wanted multiple kids but had felt so blessed to have even one, that it is still hard to wrap my head around the fact our family was built in the matter of 11 months. Life from no kids to two kids in less than a year is an adjustment but the greatest gift God could have ever given us. We hope to be done at two.......but if 2021 has taught us anything, we are not the ones in the driver seat!

We Have a MATCH!!!

December 18th, 2020 will be a day that is inscribed in the history books for this family. That is the day I received a call from our adoption counselor informing us that we have been picked and matched with a potential birth mother and father. I was at work, actually in the office, for the first time in two months when it happened and I could not get out of there fast enough to come home and hug my wife. The news is life-changing and feels like a culmination of almost 9 years of trying to grow our family. We still have potentially a couple of weeks before she is born but we are optimistic and trusting that God's plan is unfolding in front of us. 

We cannot wait to bring our daughter home and I can only imagine this is what every prospective parent, via adoption or birth, feels like leading up to the day. Not knowing if she will come today, tomorrow, or two weeks from now is nerve-racking but also the highest level of excitement I have had in my life. I pray to God every day that this is His will and we will be bringing our daughter home soon. A friend told me a couple weeks back that trusting in God and having faith is not always something that can be worked towards. Sometimes it just has to be gifted to you by God and all I have to do is open my hands and my heart to accept that gift. I have stopped working towards having that faith and trust and have decided to open myself to it, and boy does it feel good. 

Long time no post

It has been almost two months since posting and this one will likely be fairly short. No news is boring news. Our agency has seen no movement since the crazy couple of weeks in October and we are just waiting like hundreds of other families across the country and across the world to be matched and meet our future child.

When we first started waiting I thought to myself how can I ever fall back into normal daily routines knowing we could get a call and be parents any day. That is like asking a husband to act like nothing is happening when his wife is due with a baby within hours. Well, I must say it took almost six months of waiting but I have settled into life as normal again. Things look a little different, we are still buying things here and there for the nursery and building up our baby war chest. People are not going to be too happy when they want to buy stuff off our registry and we already have it all. I still don't use the sleep awake option on my phone as it silences my notifications and by golly, I'm not going to miss that phone call when it comes. 

I am very blessed and grateful for the life I have but it is hard to buy another ornament this year with just two people on it. When will the year come that we have three to go on that ornament, or four, or five?   

Days Where the Sun Never Rises

I have never understood depression and probably still don't, as it is something I have personally never felt like I have dealt with. I have always been the optimist, the positive one, the problem solver. It is just over the last few weeks that my lack of control over the situation has come into full focus and feelings of hopelessness, anger, and fear started to set it in. Usually, I am able to logically convince myself of the acceptability and even goodness of a tough situation. We have only been waiting four months in the pool, we have all the resources we need to finalize, we are where God wants us to be....etc. What I am finding though is that it just feels like the sun never rises on my days. No matter what good happens, no matter what positivity I can bring, doesn't change the feeling of darkness that covers my days recently.

I don't think I have ever stopped over the last eight years to really evaluate how different my journey is. How much of a challenge it is, and how different the end result will look than what my original dreams were. Trying naturally, moved to testing, moved to trying unnaturally, moved to loss, moved to mourning, moved to adoption. The one constant was always movement, the one thing that feels so different over the last four months is this freezing of the movement. Instead of doing another test, trying another treatment, taking another class, filing another paper, we are left to just wait. It feels like the pause button has been pressed and I have no control over when the story will resume. 

Because I am the eternal optimist, while I feel the darkness, I refuse to end this on such a negative point. I have to believe that God is redeeming the struggles of the past eight years. I have to believe that the beauty and light I will see in the future will overshadow the darkness of today. I will believe these things. 

Baby 911!!!

While we did not get placed this last month it has had some exciting moments. We had what we call a Baby 911 moment for the first time. This is the code my wife and I use to get the others attention and it goes like this. 

1. One of us gets a call, email, text, or smoke signal that there is a potential birth mother and we have some kind of action to take.

2. That person texts the other one “Baby 911”

3. That person then immediately calls the other one excited and blabbering in a way that the other person cannot understand.

A couple weeks ago our agency had a hospital call, or stork drop as some call them, regarding a birth mother who was thinking about placing. They emailed the entire waiting pool regardless of couple preferences due to the immediate need for information on who wanted to be shown. The placement was a healthy baby boy but with high legal risks for many reasons. My wife saw email before me, Baby 911d me and we put our hat in the ring that evening, knowing we wouldn’t hear anything till the next day. I was on pins and needles all morning and even had to tell my boss what was going on after snapping at him a couple of times for no good reason, as a side note he is extremely supportive of our adoption plan and completely understood.

 Needless to say we were not picked but it did make things very real all the sudden. You can academically know that the day is going to come but there is nothing like being thrust into a situation where you may be a parent the very next day to drive it home. The excitement was amazing and I know one of these days that call will be for our child. One of these days God will point that birth mother to us. One of these days I will become a dad. 

Flashback Saturday....and not in a good way

 I know the last posts have transitioned into a positive and honest discussion about the adoption process. Today is a very different date, today marks one year since we lost our Ellie only 14 weeks into her life growing in my wife's belly. Today is a somber day but one I hope to make it through. There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about her, there is not a day where I have some visceral reaction to something on TV, in the news, or said by someone. In those moments the day comes back just like it was yesterday. This week has been harder than most and the devil has been placing things in my life and way to make me fearful of what my future may be in regards to building my family. 

When I see a baby I think, Ellie would be six months old now. I would have spent a few weeks off bonding but would have been back at work for 4 months by now. Life would have gone on, I just would have had a sweet baby girl to come home to every day. OK the reminiscing of things stops now because that is not what is and it was never what was meant to be. One of the hardest parts about trusting God is letting him answer your prayers at the best time, in the best place, and in the best way. I will not accept that God made this happen but what I will embrace is that God takes all things and redeems them and works them to build a more beautiful future. This is not in the abstract either, this is in the reality of today and tomorrow. God is building me and my wife and our future family in a way that I cant see today but that will blow my mind in the way it will serve the kingdom of God. 

To pray is easy. To believe is easy. To trust is not. I want my prayers to be answered in a certain way, but guess what, that makes no sense. I pray for God's kingdom to come. I pray for Gods WILL to be done. I pray for my own acceptance of that will and my own trust that the will of God and what he is building will better serve Him, me, and the kingdom.

I will always remember and love my Ellie that never got to feel the sunshine on her face or breath a fresh mountain breeze. I have trust that the pain I have felt from her loss has already been used to build my compassion, my patience, my love for others, and how my future will be shaped forever.

    

8-10 Placements A YEAR?!?!

 We are now two months in and if anyone is reading this has gone through the adoption process they are probably saying, "hold tight, there's a lot more waiting to go". I would be lying if I didn't think we were going to be one of those miracle stories that got placed in a few weeks or a month after going active. The reality is starting to set in that the rose-colored glasses I was wearing are starting to clear. Speaking with our adoption counselor this week we found out that they do 8-10 placements a year, a statistic we did not gather in our naivete at the beginning of the process. There average 18-month wait makes more sense now know this as they keep about 20 people in their pool at any given time. Looking through their annual reports though, the place between 30 and 40 babies a year, which explains why our counselor is very knowledgable about transitioning to their designated adoption program. I am still very happy we chose the agency we did and feel strongly that God pointed us to them for the right reasons. I will say though it does not change the fact that the positivity and hope are getting harder to hold onto.

So what does this mean next? I figure we have two options. One, trudge along as is and let the agency do all the work. Two, we actively market ourselves and be much more aggressive in finding our own birth mother. I know the choice I have made and the choice I am trying to get my wife on board with. We have since paid and listed ourselves with one matching service and I am constantly looking for other services that are are lower cost and ethical to do the same. It still amazes me how much of an "Industry" adoption is, there are always people able and willing to take your money. The goal on this end is to help sort through the good and the bad to find the ones that focus on the expectant mothers as much as they care about the expectant adoptive parents.

In the end, I trust in God to help guide us through this. One of the best gifts given to us through faith is discernment.  God will help guide me if I am willing to open my ears to listen. God will build my family to something more beautiful than I can imagine. 

One Month in and ???? to Go?

We have officially been a waiting family for four weeks now. Anyone who has gone through this process understands that the time you are waiting really doesn't matter. The longest couple on the list only has one advantage, when a birth mother, or expected birth mother, has no want or desire to pick the family to partner with to raise their child. There are stories of people waiting four days to get matched and placed and there are stories of people waiting multiple years. It really comes down to being the right people for the right person at the right time. So how have I been making it through the last four weeks and how do I intend on continuing.

Excitement and buy stuff. Over the past four weeks, we have bought a bassinet, a stroller travel system, an innumerable amount of books, and I am sure many more purchases are yet to come. I cannot say I am enjoying the wait but I do have the blessing of having a wife by my side who is going through the same wait and is handling it in much of the same way I am. While it could be a couple more days or a couple more years I want to keep my excitement about the process and future family we are working towards. I expect there to be disappointments on the way, I expect there to be frustration, but I also have faith in the end result.

To get practical here just in case there is someone reading this, I have a couple suggestions if you are entering this journey.

1. No matter what someone says, even your adoption agency, DO NOT go back to life as normal from an attitude perspective. By this I mean, of course you will want to maintain your job and pay your bills and be a good partner to your significant other. What you do want to change though is your routine, your attitude, your emotions. You are doing all this to grow your family, this is the biggest decision of your life and it should be treated as such from an emotional, financial, and social perspective.

2. Have grace and then some more grace for all the people in your life. Your friends and family likely mean well when they say your wait will be short. Your significant other may badger you to email your agency for status. All these people have good intentions and are likely doing these things out of excitement as well. When it comes to everyone but your significant other, they are likely just ignorant of the process and do love you and want to see your dreams come true just like you do.

3. Read, research, watch movies, write, etc. I have found dedicating the times to read, research online, and watch adoption-related movies has been a Godsend for the process. It helps not only pass the time during the wait but also gives hope and joy to my heart that I will be one of those overjoyed dads one of these days. Writing also will give you the ability to get out onto paper what you may not even understand you are feeling, I write on this blog for that exact reason whether someone reads it or not. 

4. Pray. I pray for myself and my wife. I pray for expectant birth mothers. I pray for unborn babies. I pray for the other people who are going through the same adoption process. The latter is the most transforming as it makes people out of what we have jokingly called our competition. As I pray for them more and more, the more I want to know their stories and the more I want to see them have the joy of a child that I also and wanting so deeply. 

Almost There - Adoption from Application to Waiting Family!

As I write this we are two days from joining the adoption pool with our agency. Our best friends we started this process with entered the pool a couple weeks ago and it is awesome that we get to share in this entire experience together, and just a little bit of competition. I want to take this time to run through our journey and I hope this gives people a good idea of how easy it really is, relatively speaking, and considering they are making sure you can take care of a defenseless human that cannot even support their own head.

1. Introduction meeting (March 2019)

2. Application Start (January 10, 2020) - delayed by 5 months as we had removed ourselves from the list

3. Application Finished (February 22, 2020)

4. Home Study Visit 1 (March 3, 2020)

5. Home Study Visit 2 (March 30, 2020) - delayed a month due to Covid

6. Home Study Visit 3 (April 6, 2020)

7. Home Study Finalized (May 4, 2020)

8. Class 1 (June 5, 2020) - delayed 30 days due to Covid

9. Class 2 (June 12, 2020)

10. Officially a Waiting Family!!!! (June 12, 2020)

There was a total delay of about 30 days due to Covid meaning that in a normal situation from the moment you are able to apply you can get through the process and become a waiting family within 5-6 months. In our case, it was still completed within 6 months. This is, of course, based on our specific agency and some are faster and some are slower. Some do not have an initial waitlist, like ours of about 6 months, and others have even longer waitlists.  

It has been a very positive experience throughout, with moments of stress completely overshadowed by moments of absolute joy and hope. Our next step is the dreaded wait, which we hope to make the most out of. If you are out there reading this and considering adoption, just know the work is worth the outcome. 

COVID-19 the Ultimate Delayer

Thanks COVID, I am writing this from my kitchen counter instead of from a beach in Mexico, having not started the adoption classes that we were originally meant to be halfway through. While I am very thankful for many things in my life, i.e. still having a job, being able to even pursue adoption, etc, I still want to vent a bit. This past year has shown me that no matter how well you plan, those plans can very easily be tossed in the trash. The plan as of a couple months ago was to complete our home study, classes, and be an official waiting family as of May 8th. Then Covid came along and those plans went right down the crapper, as follows:

1. Background checks still not completed 6 weeks later because of government delays
2. Class rescheduled twice, the current timeframe is completion by the second week of June
3. Entering the pool????????

Ok, that felt good now in the words of Monty Python "GET ON WITH IT". I could dwell on the negative here and kind of want to but what good does that do anyone so let us look at some of the positive aspects. Anyone who has researched or gone down this road knows that it is very expensive and can take quite a while. Below are the major great things I want to touch on:

1. We have secured all the funding needed to complete the adoption!!!!!!
2. Our home study will be completed as of TODAY!!!!!!!
3. Due to the delays, we are able to do in-person classes, which is awesome!!!!

This whole part of the process has humbled me quite a bit and in a very good way. It is making me realize that there is power in planning but ultimately we have very little control over most things. If we don't have control then we have to have faith and trust. Who do I have faith and trust in? God is building something beautiful for my current and future family. 

The Start of a New Journey

A new journey may not be the most honest of titles for this post. I believe in one of my first post I mentioned that we had started down the adoption path last March but pulled out because of our pregnancy. This January we decided we were going to start traveling back down that path full steam, and it has been absolutely amazing. We essentially got bumped to the top of a nine-month wait list and now are only a couple steps away from being in the pool of waiting families.

Since January, we have put together document after document, completed three home visits, forked out a bunch of money, and dug through pictures to build a beautiful book about us. What should have been about year to complete, including the waiting list, has been a fast and furious three months. Our final pieces are waiting on background checks from the state of Maryland and completing a three day training class that starts in May. If all goes as currently planned we will be able to be viewed and picked by an expecting mother or family by the middle of May.

This marks a moment of triumph and lost as there is duality to saying goodbye to how we wanted to build our family originally and saying yes to this new opportunity. Through all the pain and darkness that the past seven years, and in particular the past year, has brought, I can see the light in this darkness. I can see that something beautiful is being built out of the pain and the heartache and the uncertainty. I know that the child we are meant to have will be the child that is placed in our arms whether that be in 3 months or three years.

Graduation!!!!

For anyone who has seen this blog, which I am pretty sure is no one but me at this point, you will notice I changed the title. This is a big change because I believe it truly reflects a monumental shift in where I was and where I am. My wife and I recently "graduated" from our post-pregnancy loss counseling. We had been going to her since about a month after the loss and she has been absolutely phenomenal. Jill, we can't thank you enough for all you did for us. We realized we had "graduated" when we spent about half of our last session talking about Casa Bonita, yes the crazy restaurant for South Park, we live in Denver so it is and always will be a talking point. I tell you, there is nothing like spending $60 to talk to a trained professional about a campy Mexican restaurant with cliff divers to really drive home, "your good".

Now what "your good" means is not that I have forgotten the loss or don't pain over it, it is merely that I now know it is something I can live with throughout my days. There is not a day that I don't think about our little Ellie or what our life would look like if she were born into this world a happy and healthy little girl. But I do have faith in God that this pain and the loss of her is helping to build something more beautiful than we could even fathom. In short terms, Gods got this and I trust in that.

I have a lot more I want to share but I am going to hold off for now so I can have some material for future posts.

Let get going!!!

It was a huge jump to even start this page and it kind of happened by accident as I needed the web address to something I was working on. I figured once I had it though let's do something with it. As promised a couple months ago when I first launched this page I wanted to share my story. It is long so I will paraphrase at this time and likely come back to more detailed pieces as this progresses. Also, I am a huge Star Wars nerd so if there are some references that seem out of place, please know they are probably from one of the eleven Star Wars movies that now exist.

My wife and I were married back in 2012 shortly after graduating from college. We both knew we wanted to have a family so she went off birth control immediately as we knew from some preexisting conditions it would likely take a little while to get our bodies in sync to actually make things happen. After about three years of nothing happening, we saw our first fertility specialist, then after about another year we saw another, and by the middle of 2018, we had been through three fertility specialists at two different clinics. It took us all these visits to finally decide to start doing fertility treatments and that story has been fast, hard, and painful. So since October of 2018, we have had.......

1. Three failed IUIs, all consecutive
2. One late-term miscarriage (14+ weeks)
3. A second miscarriage (6 weeks)
4. Just this week a chemical pregnancy (very early term miscarriage)

As you can see, we have been busy not making a lot of progress for the last 15 months.

For anyone going through a journey with all or any of these experiences, I am so sorry you have to feel the pain that comes with it. If you are a person of faith I pray that you find some comfort in your community, the Word, and in prayer. For those of you that are not a follower of Jesus, I hope my experience and word can help you to know you are not alone in this journey and there are always people to share with, to love, to mourn with, and to comfort or vent.

I want to keep a running list of resources that I have found helpful in my journey. Below will hopefully be an ever-growing list of books, articles, videos, other blogs, and anything that can help me and anyone else through this journey.

Books:

·       It's not supposed to be this way by Lysa TerKeurst

Articles:

·       Miscarriage Grief: Fathers Struggle Through Loss Too https://undefiningmotherhood.com/partners-and-miscarriage/

·       How Miscarriage Affects Men, One Husband's Story https://www.parents.com/pregnancy/complications/miscarriage/how-miscarriage-affects-men/

An Introduction

If you are stumbling upon this post it is generally not because you are jumping for joy, it is more likely that you have some deep pain that has overwhelmed you, at least that is what I felt when I first went searching the words, infertility-miscarriage-pregnancy loss. Unfortunately, when I search those words it kept coming up with a random article here or short story there but no unified place to find and speak about the pain I was experiencing. I do not want this to be focused on myself and my loss but to serve as a resource for others and myself to work through and discuss the other side of pregnancy loss and infertility. I want to be able to post articles and resources and have open discussions about what it means and how it feels to be the partner in these situations. I will post my story shortly and if nothing else hopefully start some healing for me and hopefully help bring others into a place of healing as well.