Caught

...in the living room with Moon Sand!

Sorry Nae, I don’t have any jokes. Hope this was cute enough to provoke a smile!

Gratitude

This photo was taken about a month ago. Harry and sweet Izzy are sitting at Father Greg’s feet with their prayer books.

I love this photo, not just because it is adorable, but because it is a reminder of God’s spiritual provision. As I see my little boy sitting at the feet of the man who has been my spiritual father since I was 9 years old, I am overcome with gratitude. I am so grateful that my son will grow up with a solid foundation. I am so grateful that he will not be “carried about by every wind of doctrine,” that he will grow up in the truths it took us so many years to find.

Sweet Cakes

This one’s for all the GuateMama’s out there...

It is hard to find recipes that are specific to Guatemala, but I found this one for Guatemalan Sweet Cakes on Epicurious a few weeks ago. Tim and Harrison were over the moon for them. I thought they were pretty good, but what I really liked was having a special treat from Guatemala for Harry.

One side note, the recipe calls for Farmer Cheese. When I was growing up, we often went to an Amish market and bought something called Farmer Cheese. It was similar to provolone. This is not that cheese. This farmer cheese is similar to cottage cheese or ricotta and can be found in the same section of the market. BUT don’t try to substitute cottage cheese as I did on the first go... yuck!

Five minutes well spent

I found this fantastic little video of John Piper sharing God’s heart, on something so close to my heart. I highly recommend it.

Where do we go from here

The day after my last post things changed for us and I knew it was finally time to write this post. But writing this post would make some things very real to me and I haven’t felt ready. Thus the silence. So here is it: the post I have started, but never finished 100 times in the last year. It is a very long story, so grab a cup of coffee and pull up a couch.

Most people who know me at all know I want a large family and I want to get that moving as soon as possible. Tim and I feel like we did our waiting before Harrison came and now we are just ready to build our family. But as most of you know, adoption is a very expensive endeavor. Expensive in dollars, expensive in lost sleep, expensive in tears. Those of us who have been “pregnant like an elephant” and spent 2 agonizing years waiting to hold our child, know that by the time you get your little one home, you need an emotional rest. So when we got home with Harry we had decisions to make. Where do we go from here? And when would we be ready to begin again?

Initially, we thought we’d go back to Guatemala, so Harrison would have a sibling from his birth country, but we felt God was holding us back, and so we waited. For quite some time my heart has been drawn to Africa. Last summer as I read “There Is No Me Without You” I knew wanted adopt from Ethiopia. Eventually. But I really thought Guatemala was the way to go next for Harry’s sake.

In the meantime, we started to think again about the possibility of conceiving. The doctors said that as I lost weight, my chances would increase. And I was losing weight. So maybe...

We decided we would just “see what happens.” We were hopeful God would bless us, but we weren’t counting on it. So we decided to start an adoption, and if we ended up with two babies at once, we’d be all the more blessed.

We had no peace about returning to Guatemala and my heart drawn more and more to Ethiopia. So we called our agency and got information. Unfortunately, we learned they had changed their policy in regards to family planning and we were expected to prevent pregnancy during the process. We had a short discussion about birth control with a pre-adoption consultant, and were left without an agency.

So now we felt like we had to make a decision, proceed with an adoption or proceed with trying to conceive. After much debate, we decided to try fertility treatment. It took several months of tests and referrals until we were sitting in the office of a fertility specialist trying to explain what we were and were not willing to do to conceive. We were scheduled to begin the next month.

Now I need to briefly rewind to give you some insight on our previous attempts at fertility treatment. First of all, I have a very strong reaction the medication I need. On these meds, I am NOT WELL 3 weeks out of the month; and by the third month, I am completely spent. So after soldiering through all the side effects, when we tried a few years ago, on the day we were scheduled to “try” I got a food poisoning. The next time on “the day”, I was in the hospital needing to have my gallbladder removed immediately. Almost every month we tried the meds, something out of our control stopped us from actually taking advantage of them. We finally decided to stop the insanity and adopt. Enter Harrison.

So back to the present. Month one: My STD tests result are not in and the doctor refuses to proceed. Reeling from the drugs, I returned to the clinic for month two. I had to be to the clinic at 7:30am for a sonogram. That is 7:30 am the day after I wrote my last post. The morning after I had been up through the night with my heart breaking, yet again, for the fatherless. The sonogram confirmed my cysts were back. Another month lost. I drove home feeling a bit numb, but not surprised.

In those moments as I drove home, I could be completely truthful with myself, and I realized several very important things about our current course of action.

1.I realized I never had believed the fertility treatment was going to work. And I really didn’t care if it did. I was just going through the motions, because on the off chance that if one day 20 years from now I wished I had experienced pregnancy and childbirth, I could tell myself I gave it my best shot.

2. I realized my frustration with not being able to try again really stemmed from my desire to just get the treatment over with. And then I could finally follow my heart to Africa.

3. I realized my only reason for wanting the treatment to actually be successful was because I really want that big family and I can’t see how we’ll ever afford it via adoption. I had to ask myself, yet again, if I could I trust God with the desires of my heart? And remind myself that if He is calling us to adopt children, he will provide a way for us to bring them home.

4. I knew that if God one day decides to open my womb, He will do it. He will do it as He has done it for generations of women before me, not with the strategies of man, but by His mighty, merciful and miraculous Hand.

I called Tim and it was clear he was not surprised either. Where do we go from here, I asked. Our hearts were in complete agreement. We needed to get off the merry-go-round and follow where God was leading.

So this week, we decided to move forward with a wonderful adoption agency that seems to have everything we want. And if all goes as planned we should be in Ethiopia by the end of the year.