15 Miles From Nowhere

Last night, I was sitting on the couch, and my precious L, my princess, walked across the room to where I was sitting and crawled up into my lap. It led me to start reflecting on just how far we've come in the last 5 years. While we have made a purposeful decision to seek out a child with special needs for this adoption, our initial plunge into special needs parenting was quite accidental. We have all come a long way since then. Our princess L is 5 1/2 now. Initially there were no signs that she might have special needs - no risk factors, no alarming tests, just the realization at about 6 months old that she wasn't developing properly. Up until that point in my life, I was very focused on worldly success and achievements - on DOING. I thought you made your impact on this world by what you did. Princess L didn't do much for a long time. She was over a year old when she sat up for the first time, close to 3 when she began walking. It was a long road. She wasn't very r

Ways to support our adoption: FREE ways to help: Give us your stinky old shoes! - We are collecting shoes to be reused in developing nations through an entrepreneurship program. Our goal is 10,000 pairs, so it is a God-sized goal and we need your help! This program has BIG potential to pay it forward: our adoption grant receives 40 cents per pound for the shoes, an entrepreneur is set up to sell them and earn a living wage, and low cost shoes are available to people in need.  Even better: talk to your work or church and set up a box! If you'll watch it and let us know when it's full, we'll come collect them! We have a HUGE goal to meet, and we need your network too! Help us check the current drop offs and bring us shoes when they overflow. Since we do not live in town, this is an especially big help! Current drop offs are: Lumbermart and Stage in Guymon, the Methodist Student Center and Church of Christ Student Center in Goodwell, Mills in Hooker, and the Post Offi

It's been awhile since I've updated the blog. If you want up to the minute updates, check us out on Facebook ! Yesterday was a very exciting day! We were notified yesterday morning that our dossier was submitted!!! WOOHOO! The rest of our documents had just made it into the hands of the facilitation team on Wednesday afternoon (their time), so we were pretty surprised that it was submitted so quickly! In fact, there was one document that we thought we might need to tweak and re-do, but it was great! Of course, 95% of the dossier had been there for at least a couple of weeks (this was the 3rd batch to send over) so they had everything ready to go. The next step is receiving travel dates! That will be very exciting! We can expect to receive dates in 3-4 weeks, although sometimes it takes more or less time. The family that was submitted before us received their dates fast, so we may not have a whole lot of time left! This is SUPER EXCITING except for the fact that we are still

Adoption is a long, grueling, expensive journey. Many people have walked this journey with us, even if just from afar. Many times I have been to the point of questioning whether or not we can really make this happen. And every time, I have been encouraged from someone. God is working through YOU, each and every one of our supporters. We are down to the end. All of the approvals are in place, it's just minor paperwork from here on out. We still need our approval from her government and to pass court, of course, but I have faith in our facilitation team, who has painstakingly combed through our documents to make sure everything will go smooth with the government and judge.  I'm excited about this new fundraiser. It is designed to honor YOU, the tribe that is helping us get our little girl home. The people who are helping us save her life. YOU. Yes, YOU are part of saving her life - you really and truly are. We are just part of this adoption, we are not all of it. Without your

SO, Monday it OFFICIALLY came. We received our USCIS approval! This is the last approval needed on this side of the ocean. I knew it was coming last week - I had called USCIS, and they confirmed that it was on it's way.  Here's the funny thing though - there was part of me that was still a little bit surprised. To me, the word "approval" is a scary word. Every step of the way I have been extremely stressed when we face another approval. You see, I have this picture of adoptive parents as completely perfect parents. They have to be perfect to pass all of those inspections and stuff, right? And part of this picture of perfection is the perfect looking mom wearing the cardigan and heels while effortlessly maintaining an immaculate house while her rich husband golfs. Yeah, I definitely don't fit that picture. So here I sit, midway through our second adoption, having received another approval, wondering when the heck I became perfect enough that someone would actua

I'm continuing with the story of WHY we chose special needs adoption. If you haven't read it yet, check out part one here . I started this series by telling you about when we learned that our princess L has special needs, and how it affected us.  As time went on, we began to embrace our new life.  Life went on, as it always seems to do; and our family continued to grow.  One son joined our family through guardianship (we were later able to adopt him) and then we had another son.  We moved to a rural area to be near my family, and our children thrived. Everyone was happy and healthy. There are moments when life turns on a dime, and your entire life changes in an instant.  I had one of these moments in the middle of an ordinary day.  I was killing time on Facebook, like I do all too often.  I ran across a blog post that a friend had shared, and I read it.  The blog has been taken down since then, but I'll never forget it.  This post gutted me.  An adoptive mom talked abou

So, maybe a garage sale doesn't need it's own blog post, but in this case, I think it does. So, here's the story of how one small garage sale turned into a great big blessing. I'll just start with my dirty little secret: I did NOT want to do a garage sale.  The last few garage sales I've tried have been a nightmare, and not at all worth the time and effort.  However, my cousin suggested that we do a garage sale, and said that she would help, and I figured that I can't turn down good help, so we went for it.  We planned it for her front yard (I live in the country so my house wouldn't work).  Fast forward to the week of the garage sale: we had very few donations, she was scheduled to work for basically the entire sale, and my daughter and I both got sick that week.  I was in tears the day we decided to postpone it.  We've had a lot going on in our family lately, and I was sick, overwhelmed, and defeated.  So, we postponed one week. It's funny how

The internet is a depressing place lately.  It seems like every time I get online I see a new article or hear a story from another parent about their special needs child being abused at the hands of a caregiver.  So this goes out to you, the caregivers: the bus drivers, teachers, classroom aides, Special Ed teachers, Special Ed paraprofessionals, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, Sunday School teachers, Children's ministers, babysitters, and anyone else who has access to my child, both past and present. Thank you for loving my daughter. I see the way you interact with her, I hear the way you talk to her. I SEE the love, I KNOW you care. I don't need her to use words, I see the way she reacts to you, and I can tell how you treat her. I have always said that she is a good judge of character, and I can tell when she trusts someone. She trusts you, and that is a high compliment. Thank you for taking the time to enter her world. You will never

I have sat down a million times to explain WHY we would specifically adopt a child with special needs & what special needs parenting means to me. But I just can't explain it without the back story. So here it is... the beginning of our journey in special needs parenting. I remember vividly when I was pregnant with our baby girl and we were choosing names.  My husband liked a lot of cutesy little girl names, and I kept saying that we need something strong.  Something suitable for a strong, fierce woman who could someday be a doctor, lawyer, or President of the United States!  She needed something that would look good on her PhD diploma.  At the time I worked for a university, and one of my tasks was printing diplomas, and my argument was that you rarely see a "cutesy" name on a doctoral diploma.  We settled on a "cutesy" name, with a long version. You know, for her PhD diploma some day.  We settled on a name that to me, spoke of kindness, gentleness, but wi

I think in this case, adoption is like the longest, most annoying pregnancy ever! Haha We are still waiting. It seems like everything is one step forward, two steps back. Our homestudy needed edits, so we have to re-send it to her country. There goes another $30 in apostilles. Our medical forms were done in April for the homestudy, but have to be less than 5 months old, so need to be done again... there goes another $300. Our USCIS fingerprint appointments are the farthest out date imaginable and our local office (which is 300 miles away, so not exactly local) doesn't take walk ins. It feels like we've been hit with a lot of negative lately. Please say a prayer for us that we can move through these obstacles quickly, and maybe even cheaply. Once we get through these delays, things should move quickly (we hope). On the other side, we have experienced an awesome group of friends and family that have stepped up to help us along the way. They have prayed, encouraged us, and

***HUGE DISCLAIMER*** Newborn adoption, where a biological mom immediately gives the child to an adoptive family is NOT what I'm talking about here! That is a very loving, selfless act, and is beautiful for all who are involved. Older child adoption and foster care adoption, these things are a little more messy... please read on... Okay, so the title of this post is probably a little shocking. You see, I LOVE ADOPTION! I really, truly do. Our family has been blessed by a child through adoption, and I couldn't imagine my life without him. Adoption has without a doubt made my life richer, fuller, more amazing. Adoption is a beautiful way to take a child from the depths of a tragic situation, and show them a new life. Adoption quite literally saves the lives of orphans in many cases. It gives them hope. It gives them a future with possibilities that could never have happened. But this weekend, we saw the hint of scars left behind, and I was reminded of how much I hate the other

SO, last week was a big week.  It's been crazy, but I've finally found a few minutes to update... After what felt like a million delays, our homestudy was FINALLY ready, so last Monday (8/17) I went to pick it up. Since the homestudy agency is in the OKC metro I took the bulk of our dossier to be apostilled at the same time.  An apostille is a state seal, where the state verifies that the notary is valid.  Anyway, we live about 4 1/2 hours from the homestudy agency & state capitol, so we drove up to take care of it in one day.  We saved probably about 2 weeks of mail time that way.  My mom went with me (BLESS HER!), which was awesome because it was a very stressful day.  We had a couple of hiccups, a lot of driving across the OKC metro, and a crazy day, but at the end of the day, this is where we are at: Our completed homestudy was overnighted to USCIS to catch up with the application that we filed last March.  They have had it over a week now, so we are hoping for a

So... I haven't blogged in a VERY long time.  Here's what has been going on with the adoption process since last summer... Last summer we had to put the adoption on hold for a little bit while we sold our house in Yukon.  It had been a rental property, and when the tenants moved out, we decided to put it on the market and use the proceeds toward the adoption.  Well, it didn't sell for several months.  And by the time we repaired things for sale, paid the mortgage for several months, and lowered the price we ended up basically breaking even.  So that plan failed.  Oh well, that's life!  But while paying two mortgages, having to do necessary repairs to this house (which we had just bought the prior winter & needed quite a bit more than we thought), we were financially drained. So we put everything on pause.  Then last August I went back to work.  I'd say that was a mistake for our family, but it gave us a big boost financially, so I can't.  But it was an i