Friday, May 28, 2010

Our Story

Growing up, I always knew I was going to adopt.  I can't really explain better than me envisioning never getting married and adopting children when I was older (like later 30's).  As far as I remember, I never envisioned, played or imagined my wedding, like many little girls do. 
When I was a teenager, I realized that God was laying the foundation for me to adopt.  During multiple mission trips to orphanages, I could feel Him tell me that was what I was made for. I had a harder time leaving the orphanages than I did leaving home. 
And then, I met him.  My husband, Owen. I originally met him when I was 15 or 16, and then we ran into each other when I was in college.  From the moment we met each other (for the 2nd time), we knew we were going to get married.  15 months later, we walked down the aisle and 52 weeks after that, I gave birth to our first daughter.
Shortly after our daughter turned a year old, we started talking about adopting.  We knew we would adopt, but it was just a matter of when.  God had opened some doors for us and it looked like we would be adopting twin boys.  We were so excited. Just when we started going through all of the paperwork to adopt the boys, we found out we were pregnant.  After praying about the situation, God told us that we needed to back away from it.  (The story in itself is really amazing, but very lengthy) So, we did just that.
7 months later, our beautiful baby girl was born.  I knew shortly after she was born that something wasn't right.  She screamed like crazy, was never content and puked everywhere.  Parenting her, especially as an infant, was the hardest thing I've accomplished.  For the first year of her life, she only slept for 20 minutes at a time.  She refused to eat and ended up with a feeding tube.  We moved to be closer to her doctors, and drove to therapy every Friday for 2 years (1 1/2 hours each way for a year, and then when we moved back to our hometown, 3 hours each way for a year). To this day, she is still undiagnosed, but after a very long 4+ years of medical problems, we have made it through the valley and are stronger than ever.
During this time, I longed to have another child.  But, it just wasn't right. We were too exhausted and our lives weren't in the right place. We waited and prayed; and waited and prayed; and waited and prayed some more.  We knew God would tell us when & where.  We didn't know how long our wait would be.  He had to tell us when and put us in the position to be able to adopt......and now, He has!

Thanks for listening to our story.
~Katie

1 comment:

  1. What a surprise! I had no idea. Not just a garage sale!

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