National Adoption Month

November is national adoption month.  If you have read my blog, you know in detail just a portion of my feelings during our struggle to become parents.  Here is a very condensed version of our story.  Eric and I were married in March of 1999.  It probably wasn't even a year that we started trying to have a family.  There is really no telling how many pregnancy test I took in about 5 or 6 year.  I wanted to be pregnant so bad, I would convince myself I was pregnant.  It was devastating each time it was negative.  After around 3 years of trying, we finally started testing to see what was wrong.  The Dr. told us it would be a miracle for us to get pregnant on our own.  I just new that miracle was going to happen for us.  There is absolutely no way for me to put into words the emotions involved with infertility.  It is AWEFUL!!!!  If you know someone who is going though it, please have patients with them and just be there for them.  You can be just fine going about you business, and BAM your emotions will it you.  We were at a function for one of our nephew, and I was having a descent night.  All of a sudden, I looked over at my mother in-law, and when I saw the pride on her face for her grandson, I lost it.  I had to leave and go out to the car.  I cried so hard I nearly threw up.  Nobody can understand the emotions if you haven't been there. 
Our options were invitro or adoption.  We knew invitro wasn't for us.  With the expense and the odds of it working, we just couldn't see putting our money into something with such low odds.  I was still thinking we would get that miracle and not have to deal with any of that stuff.   Christmas was always the hardest time of year for me.  I wanted a child so bad to share the season with.  It was also some unspoken goal that we would have a child by Christmas.  It was Christmas time December 2007 and I remember exactly where I was standing when I was on the phone with Eric while he was driving home from hunting.  I was telling him I just couldn't do this anymore and that I was ready to start looking into adoption.  We decided to do some research and get the process started after Christmas.  We originally wanted to go to Guatemala to adopt.  We had found an adoption agency to use and were ready to start the process.  Well just our luck, Guatemala adoptions were stopped in January 2008.  The agency assured us that they would have the new adoption laws in place and be ready to start being able to process adoptions in Guatemala later in the year.  We had waited this long, what's a few more months.  In the mean time, someone told me about a potential adoption situation.  Well of course I thought that was going to be the one, and immediately I got my hopes up.  Needless to say it didn't work out, and I was devastated.  I got so depressed and angry.  I had to get to that broken point for a blog post to really touch me.  I normally wouldn't have emailed Barbie Bassett (a local meteorologist) about her blog, but I just had to share with her how God had used her words to help lift me up.  Because of that email, she told me about The Christmas Village.  We signed up with them in September 2008.  In October 2009 we had our first match.  When that fell through it wasn't an immediate end to the situation.  We were up and down with this birth mother for around 9 months.  Little did we know that while all this was going on, the child that would eventually become our son was being born.  Skipping forward to March 2011, we had our second match with them.  This one was going to be very quick.  The baby was to be born in just a few weeks.  Then there were problems with the birth father not signing his rights so that the baby could be adopted.  Again, everything just fell apart, me included.  I just can't explain the pain I felt.  I felt like my heart was being ripped out.  I thought it wasn't ever going to happen for us and I was ready to give up. 
On May 27, 2011 I got a call around 4:30 that they had a boy who was 1 1/2 years old and he could be ours that night if we said yes.  Needless to say we were ecstatic, and he was brought to us at around 7:30 that night.  Brody has been with us for almost a year and 1/2.  We started off with our challenges because of things he had been through.  It took a while for him to fully trust us and bond to us, but now it is so hard to remember our lives without him.  Our lives were so empty without him.  There were so many times I thought I would never hear a child call me mama.  ( it is so funny that as soon as I was typing mama, I hear Brody call out mama)  :-)  He does my heart good. 
For anyone out there that reads this and is going through something difficult, I hope you will take away the fact that we had to go through some really bad times in order to get to where we are now.  When that first situation fell through, it eventually led us to The Christmas Village.  Then if it hadn't been for our first situation falling through with them, they wouldn't have had as strong of a desire to see us adopt.  Each thing that happened added to our story and eventually let us to become the parents to our precious little boy.