Good News!

Over these past 8 months, we have been filling out paperwork, attending classes, filling out more paperwork, participating in interviews, finishing up our home study, talking to a birthmother…YOU HEARD ME J  Wow, do I have a ton to tell you!!!

March has been a busy month!  I applied for an administrator position in the school district that I work in.  I turned in my application on March 2nd, sat in on my first interview March 6th, and experienced a second interview on March 7th.  The finalists knew that the administrators wanted to present their choice to the board on March 13th.  I came home very frustrated on March 9th knowing that they would wait to state their choice on March 12th.  As I was pulling up to our house, a woman was running to our front door.  Danny answered the door at the same time as I got out of the car.  She was our neighbor from down the street.  She stood there with a piece of paper in her hand saying “You need to call my friend.  Her daughter needs a family for her baby.  You need to call my friend.”  We took her advice.  We called her friend. 

Her friend, who we will refer to as the birth grandmother, took a couple minutes from her busy evening to explain that her daughter was about 7 months pregnant and she wanted to know if we were interested in becoming the family for her daughters child.  I told her that we would love to find out if we could be a good fit for her grandchild.  She told me that she would call me the following day to talk more.

The birth grandmother called me the next day and we talked for over an hour.  She helped me understand why her daughter needed to find a home for her child and I got the opportunity to talk to the birth grandmother about us.  At the end of our conversation, she asked me to call her daughter and let her know that we were interested in providing a home for her child.

I had my first conversation with her daughter, who we will refer to as our birthmother, that next day.  That was one of the hardest conversations I have ever had.  I still don’t remember everything I said.  I remember explaining to her that her mom had contacted us because she knew that we were in the adoption process.  I remember explaining to her why we were adopting.  I remember her repeatedly saying “I just want my baby to have a family that will love them.”  Within that conversation, I also learned that she needed financial assistance.  I told her that we could provide her help but we needed to find out the legalities surrounding this situation.  I asked her if she would be open to talking with someone from our agency.  She said that our agency could call her.

Within a week, our birthmother agreed to work with our agency.  A week and a half after our first conversation, she came into town to sign the paperwork with Sunny Ridge and that evening, I got to go to dinner with her.  The days leading up to her arrival, I was a complete wreck.  I continually thought I was going to blow this opportunity.  I was so scared that she wouldn’t like who I was or thought I wouldn’t be a good mom to her child.  Danny tried to reassure me but his efforts couldn’t compete with the constant voice in my head.

I was amazed at how much we talked at dinner and how easy she was to talk to.  This woman was so easy going, funny, and open.  At the end of our evening, our birthmother stated that she would like to meet Danny and Graham so we decided to go to dinner the following evening. 

After surveying friends, we decided to go to El Cortez.  We arrived a couple minutes early and decided to wait for the birth family before being seated.  As we waited by the door, Graham saw a man walk in.  Graham asked me what this man’s name was and I told him I didn't know but we could find out.  We started small talk with the gentleman and I told him that my son wanted to know his name.  The man leaned forward and asked Graham if he wanted to know his name.  My son, being shy, quickly hid behind me.  The gentlemen laughed and stated that his youngest was the same way.  To continue our conversation, I asked how old his youngest was.  He stated she was 12.  Our mouths dropped open.  This man looked no older than 25.  I asked how old his oldest was and he told us 14.  I apologized for my bluntness but I needed to know his age.  He shared with us that he was 42.  We both started to ask for advice J  and he laughed at us.  This man then asked if Graham was our only child.  We told him that Graham was our only blessing but that we were currently in the adoption process and had recently been approached by a birthmother.  He was thrilled for us!  He shared with us that this brother had just completed their pending adoption months earlier and told us of the joy those children had brought to his family.  As his woman walked in, he wished us the best of luck and entered into the restaurant. Moments later, our birthmother, her mom and step-father had walked in.  We took the opportunity to introduce ourselves and were seated. 

We ordered our meals and engaged in great conversation.  About an hour and a half into our meal, our waitress came over to our table extremely excited.  She said “He left so I can finally tell you.”  We asked her what she was talking about…who had left?  She said “There was a gentleman, that was sitting over there, that had picked up our meal.”  Our mouths dropped open.  We asked if she was kidding and she said no.  She explained that he was a regular and he wanted to pay for our meal.  Tears came to my eyes.  We were completely speechless at this kind gesture of a stranger.

The next day, I got the opportunity to drive our birthmother to the train station.  We took that chance to talk about more personal topics like whether her kids knew about the pregnancy/pending adoption, if she had a name for the baby, the day she goes into labor, where she wanted to baby to live while the 72 hours waiting period was active, what the birth father was like, her level of openness after placement, etc.  My heart melted for this woman.  She is a woman that loves her children.  She understands the privilege of parenthood and wishes she was in a better situation to keep this child (and the last child, whom she had placed for adoption last May).  She continued to tell me that she knew she could not provide for this baby.  She didn’t have the time, energy, or money with having four kids at home.  I completely understand that she loves this baby as much as her other children but understands the limitations she has.  I couldn’t have had more respect for this woman. 

Two and a half weeks later, our birthmother attended her first doctor’s appointment to get all of the routine tests run.  The doctor set her first ultrasound the following day so that they could determine her due date.  Danny took the opportunity to talk to our birthmother the morning of her ultrasound to ask how she was doing physically, mentally, and emotionally.  At the end of the conversation, Danny asked if she was going to find out the gender of the baby and she said she would.  

I came home from work around 4:30 in the afternoon.  I could tell that Danny was as overwhelmed as I was feeling.  It was at this time he told me about their conversation that morning and shared with me that she would text us after she got out of her appointment.  A couple minutes before 5 p.m., the birth grandmother called me.  She told me that her daughter was finishing up her appointment but that she had news for us.  She said “I don’t know what you wanted so I hope I don’t disappoint you but she is having a girl.”  I was so ecstatic I could barely talk.  I told her that “all we wanted was for her daughter and the baby to be healthy.”  She confirmed that both of them where healthy and I told her that was all that mattered.  I shared with her that I was so excited at the opportunity to be a mother to her grandchild. 

When I got off the phone, I could barely think straight.  I sat down at the dinner table with Danny and Graham and just smiled.  Danny asked me if they were both okay.  I told him they were.  He then asked if she had found out the gender.  I told him yes.  He looked like he was going to jump out of his skin J  He yelled with enthusiasm “Tell me already!”  I took a second to contain my excitement and responded with “God blessed me years ago with a momma’s boy and now He is blessing you with a daddy’s girl.”  He was stunned.  He continued to eat dinner and repeated to himself “I can't believe it, we are going to have a daughter.”

We decided that it was time to let Graham know what was going on.  Graham has always talked about having brothers and sisters but he was always referring to his friends or cousins when using those labels. 

We started talking to Graham about the adoption process when we started our adoption classes in September.  We would always start our conversations by reminding Graham that he was very special because he had come from mommy’s belly and God had picked him out just for us.  We then would explain to him that his brother or sister would not be coming from mommy’s belly like Trent and Evan came from Aunt Sara’s belly or Preslee and Kingston from Aunt Brooke’s.  We told Graham that God had special plans to pick out a brother or sister for him and that God was going to allow this baby to grow in other woman’s belly.  Since we started those talks with Graham in September, he has stopped us many times in public to ask about a pregnant woman nearby to find out if “my brother or sister is in her belly?”  We continued to tell him that “God would lead us to his brother or sister but for now, we just had to be patient.”  Today was the day we finally had the confidence to tell Graham that God had shown us. 

We sat down with Graham and asked him if he wanted to know if he was getting a brother or a sister.  He said he wanted to know.  He was excited but very quickly overwhelmed.  We gave him an opportunity to process what we just told him and then he was ready to tell everyone about his sister.

With our birth family being a couple hours away, we wanted to plan a trip out to meet them.  I contacted my best friend from college to see if she would be willing to help us figure things out around her home town.  She offered something bigger.  Her and her family wanted to provide for us a place to live for the two nights we were going to be in town.  This made this trip even more special to me.  Janelle was the first person ever to show me what it was like to have a true friendship.  I was so excited that I was going to get the opportunity to spend some time with her during this incredible journey. 

We decided to travel out to the Quad Cities on Easter weekend to visit our birthmother, birthfather, and their kids. We arrived at James and Janelle’s home late on Thursday night.  They had our room already set up for us to come in and collapse.  Danny and Graham got ready for bed and I took that time to catch up with my friend and talk with her husband. 

The next morning, Danny and I were so nervous to hang out with the whole birth family that we stalled on getting the day started.  Janelle had to practically kick us out of her house.  It only took us 10 minutes to get to our birth family's house from Janelle's house.  Within minutes, they made us feel at home.  Graham had a blast playing with their kids, I got the chance to hang out with our birthmother some more, and Danny got the opportunity to hang with the birthfather.  During this visit, the birthmother pulled me to the side to show me the ultrasound pictures from the appointment she had several days earlier.  My eyes instantly filled with tears.       

Top picture: Her foot
Bottom picture: Her profile

Top picture: Hand and arm
Middle picture: Upper and lower leg
Bottom picture: Four heart chambers

I walked over to Danny to share these breathtaking pictures of our daughter.  He was as surprised as I was.  At this time, I walked over to the birthfather.  I remember saying “I hope you don’t think I am weird but can I give you a hug?”  He allowed me to hug him and I whispered to him “You two are a Godsend.  Thank you so much.” 

We see God's presence throughout this whole experience:

• We met our birth grandmother back in September at our Adoption Benefit Garage Sale.
• The gentleman that paid for our first meal with our birth family was the man waiting with us at the front of the restaurant moments before they arrived. 
• I did not receive the administration position.  Every time I prayed during that interview process, I asked God to prepare me for my next step.  He was…it had nothing to do with my job J
• We started this process on August 2, 2011.  Our birthmothers due date is May 15, 2012.  Our birthmothers due date is 9 ½ months after we started the adoption process.

We spent 9 hours together over two days with our birth family.  On our drive home, Danny and I felt as confident as people can in this process to be able to share this information with our friends and family.  Please understand that this is not a guarantee.  Our birthparents could change their mind.  They could choose to keep their baby or find another family.  We have just realized that we need to enjoy this process and give our fear to God. 

We would like to ask for prayer during this stressful time.  We ask for prayers of strength and patience for our family.  We ask for prayers of peace and confidence for our birth family.  And most of all, for God’s will to be done here, not ours.

Our Financial Journey

“If you want what normal people have, do what normal people do. If you want what few people have, do what few people do.”  

- Dave Ramsey

I think the hardest part to prepare for was the financial burden that this decision can bring. 

Looking back on this, it is amazing to realize that God has been preparing us for this challenge over the past couple years.  In June of 2005, we had moved in to a beautiful two-bedroom, three bath townhome in Mokena.  We figured we were going to live there for at least 7 years…at least that is what we said J We were blessed with Graham in August of 2007 and were completely blown away with how amazing parenthood was. In April 2008, Danny and I started talking about having another child which would mean, we would need more space.  So in May, we put our home up for sale, had a contract by the end of June, and moved out the last weekend of July.  It went so fast that we didn’t have time to find our home!  We moved in on with my parents and brother in their two bedroom townhouse in Park Forest.  We quickly found a five bedroom, three bath fixer-upper in Frankfort with a price we could afford.  We were ecstatic and started planning how we were going to turn this house into our forever home.

Two months later, Danny started losing hours at work.  By November, Danny had his hours drastically cut.  In December, Danny worked 40 hours for the whole month!  With the New Year came no hours and in the second week of February, Danny filed for unemployment for the first time.  Two days before we would have received his first check, Danny got a call to work.  He worked 4 hours that day and he was back to waiting for work.  He applied for unemployment for the second time and he was told he needed to start his two week waiting week again because he only waited for 8 business days before.  Danny received his first unemployment check the beginning of March.  By this time, we had been living off of savings for the past 4 months because we kept hearing from the union that “you should be working again soon.”  We knew that something needed to change…fast! 

We started looking, back in December, for advice that was going to teach us how to fix the mess we were in.  Mess doesn’t define it…we were drowning.  We had over $30,000 in debt and a house that was now eating up 48% of my take-home pay.  We were in a lot of trouble and knew that if we didn’t change something now, we weren’t going to have a home or cars to worry about.  We starting with reading the Money Map in January 2009 and got an idea about important financial decisions that we needed to start making.  We quickly learned that reading about those steps was the easy part…actually doing them I thought was going to kill us!  Trying to track our spending for one month…took us three months to complete!  The next step was to create a budget…that wasn’t hard but sticking to that budget was.  The amount of fighting was insane.  Needless to say, we didn’t make it on that plan. 

In March 2009, my friend introduced me to a book called “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey.  She knew we were having problems with the plan we were on.  I ended up renting it from our school library and we read it over the spring break.  We started talking about Dave Ramsey’s very simple baby steps to financial freedom and we recruited my brother and his wife to join us on this adventure.  In April we started with tracking our money and in May started our envelope system.  It wasn’t easy but having other people to go through it with, made a huge difference.  We got “gazelle intense.”  We downsized ANY additional spending so that we could take that extra money and roll it into our debt snowball.  What we did over the next year was truly amazing.  We left $1,000 in our savings account (which is also referred to as an emergency fund) and put every dollar above and beyond that into our smallest debt.  Over the next 11 months, that debt snowball rolled fast!  Was it easy?  NO!  During that time, we bought no clothes, we downsized our satellite service ($62.29) to the basic channels ($16.04 a month), decreased our eating out money to $100 a month, reduced our fun money to $30 a month, researched lower insurance premiums for our house and cars (saved over $500 in that year), and traded in our leased 2007 Honda CRV for a car that as half the price. 

Now, as many people have experienced at some point, when you start making the right choices, there is always setbacks.  Our big setback was in October of 2009.  In August of 2009, we had paid off Danny’s car and moved our coverage to liability.  In October, our car rear ended another car and it was totaled.  That car was towed back to our house and sat in our driveway for months until we could figure out what we could afford to do.  For the next 10 months, Danny and Graham drove me to and from school every week day and to my Graduate classes every Monday night until we could afford to get our vehicle up and running.

In March of 2010, we were able to look at each other and scream “WE ARE DEBT FREE!” That same day, we removed Danny off of unemployment because we no longer needed that money to survive.  

Since then, we have made good financial strides but it is still tough.  We were paying for my second Masters with cash and it was eating up 17% of our household income.  We have started our retirement accounts and Graham’s college savings.  During our research of all of the financial companies, Danny found his calling.  He is now a financial advisor that compliments many of Dave Ramsey’s principles and gets to work with individuals and families that need the same help we were searching for back in November of 2008.  In the field that he is in, he volunteers his time to meet with and guide many families because most of the families that he works with, can’t use his services because they are struggling as much as we were and don’t have the money to invest in their future.

After attending all of the adoption informational meetings, I would be lying if I said that the price tag of adoption didn’t scare me.  I remember looking at Danny and saying, “even if we cleaned out the emergency fund, we still wouldn’t have enough.”  After several conversations and some research, we learned that there were loans that were available for adoption that would lend you up to $20,000 at 9% interest.  Danny and I agreed that “Dave Ramsey wouldn’t approve.”  So that got us thinking…what would Dave Ramsey tell us to do?  So we looked into it.

We logged onto www.daveramsey.com and started reading. I came across the daily summary of one of his shows from earlier in the week and the third topic on the list was a woman that had written a book called “Adopt Without Debt.” Wow…sometimes God is subtle and other times he literally smacks you in the face J

I read the first chapter on Amazon to get a feel for the book.  I was sold immediately, ordered it, and every day came home looking for the box at my front door.  I got so excited when it arrived in the mail that I finished the book 3 hours after it hit my doorstep. I was so inspired.  The family in the book had lived our life; financial struggle, behavior change, setbacks, unemployment, successes, and a desire to bring children into their family through adoption.  Danny and I started talking about which fundraising options we would consider doing and decided that we could handle an adoption benefit garage sale.  We talked with our friends, who were also in the adoption process, to see if they would be interested in joining forces for these fundraising efforts.  They were in.  

Both of our families ransacked our houses to find any items that we could include in our garage sales.  We started telling family and friends what we were doing and before we knew it, the two car garage was full.  We had always known that we were surrounded by amazing people but it was amazing to see how the people around us stepped up for us. 

We started brainstorming when, where, and how we were going to step up and run this garage sale.  We knew with the cold weather approaching, that we were going to need to move quickly.  One of the first ideas I put out there was a church sale that I had been a part of in March.  This church would allow anyone to sign up, with paying a registration fee, would secure a spot as a seller in the resale event.  I emailed the coordinator to see if she would consider allowing us to bring items to their resale event. It took two weeks to hear back from the coordinator but the news was well worth the wait.  She had discussed our situation with the principal and they waived our registration fee and lowered the percentage of fundraising that they earn from the items bought at the sale.  I was speechless and extremely grateful.  They did not have to do that for us and they did.  Absolutely amazing! 

The work that ended up going into preparing for this sale was intense.  Since there was over 70 sellers in this resale event, each item that was brought to this sale needed to have a tag that included the seller’s name, seller’s number, and description of the item, size, and price.  There were countless hours that were put in by both of the families and within two weeks, we had labeled enough items to fill a moving truck.  Even though the shopper turnout was much lower than in years past, we ended up bringing home enough to pay for our application and one of our adoption classes!

Now we had another major decision to make.  We were hosting an adoption benefit garage sale at our house in six days!  Were we going to keep the items that were tagged priced or remove the tags to allow the shopper to tell us what they wanted to pay for the items they were interested in?  We went back and forth but decided to follow the guidance that was given in the Adopt Without Debt book.  We removed all of the tags and prepared ourselves for the negotiations that were going to occur. 

During those six days in-between the sales, we continued to see the people around us step up to our needs.  Our church showed their support by allowing us to use 7 massive tables for our sale which made a world of a difference.  On Friday morning, we had a packed two car garage full of donations and a hard working volunteer (Thanks again Chris J) to help us that first morning.  It took us over 4 hours to carry out all of the boxes and load the tables up with as many items as possible. 


                       
We had boxes and boxes of items stacked up under and next to the tables.  We had massive amounts of people stopping by to shop our sale and to ask questions. 

Of course we had people show up that were just shopping to score a deal.  But other individuals completely blew our mind.  We had many people just offer donations and several others pay much more than what the items were worth because it was going to a good cause. 

At the end of the day, it took us almost 3 hours to get everything packed up and back in the garage.  At the end of Day 1, we had raised enough to pay for our second class!  We were amazed!!  And exhausted.  We got up the next morning to do it all again.  We decided while unpacking that we needed to move more items because we still couldn’t unpack all of the boxes because there was not enough room to display it!  So…we sold grocery bags of items for $5 and boxes for $10.  We moved a TON of items and continued to meet tons of people that would share their adoption stories or their struggles.  At the end of Day 2, we saw that we had sold a ton of donations.  We were amazed to learn that we had raised more money selling bags and boxes than when individuals were bidding on items.

We still had enough items remaining that half of the garage was still full of items.  We decided to host another garage sale two weeks later.  With the weather shift and incredible winds, we were not nearly as successful that weekend.  We decided that it was time to donate these incredible gifts to another cause to allow God’s work to be done with the generosity of our loved ones.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This was one of the most mind blowing experiences I have experienced when it has come to asking for help.  I was raised to take care of you and not to burden others.  I learned that if you allow others to help you, you get to allow God to show you amazing opportunities. 

So here we are.  We are following God’s lead right now.  We just finished our home study and God has continued to guide us in this process.  Keep your eyes on our page…we will be sharing more information very shortly J