Why should we be when we already are?

I have spent tireless hours in our swagger wagon the past few weeks now that school has started. Three back packs. Three lunchboxes. One nap mat. Six snacks. Three water bottles. I could go on and on. If you asked me when I was 22 and right out of college if I saw myself doing that 10 years later what do you think I would have said? I would have said "sure". I'm not sure if it's because of my parents or my environment, but I never had this yearning to make a lot of money, to marry some big wig or have a powerful job. In college I never even thought about how much money I'd have to make to survive and I didn't even realize math majors existed until I met my husband. I never knew what I wanted to be. I guess I had this inkling that I didn't have to be anything because I was already something and I just had to wait it out.

When Chris and I had our first son, I could tell he was just like me even as an infant. It was my first time experiencing similar characteristics in my entire life since I'm adopted and it was amazing to see me in him. He was and still is, bubbly, talkative, emotional, creative, and empathetic. He has this sense about him, knowing that other people's feelings are important. Making sure they feel loved is important. It made me realize that I don't have to be anything because I am me, just for him and his brothers. It was the first time in my life when I realized what God needed me to be. Selfless.  It's what all mothers are really called to be. My birthmother, the few hours I got to spend with her before I was brought to my mother, selfless. My mother, adopting a child knowing it would bring complications to her own family, selfless. Mama Mary, accepting the ultimate challenge of giving birth to The Son of Man and watching him die on a cross, beautifully and perfectly selfless. I wanna be like that.

When we experienced our first adoption that fell through last year I was angry, I did my "ugly cry" a lot. We had named her Faith, she was just perfect, so much hair, tiny little long fingers that I knew wrapped around her brother's fingers would be a blessing to us. We couldn't imagine the birthmom keeping her because she had previously placed 4 other children for adoption. But she wasn't our blessing, in fact she wasn't ours at all and we were called to be selfless. That's a hard lesson to teach but we did it and are thankful for God's grace and mercy because we know there's more to come.

So, one day in one of the "go to gymnastics, stop at Chic fil A and then head to teeball" nights, we were going around saying what we wanted to be when were grew up. I always go first, because I'm the boss, and I tell them I'm not a grown up yet so I still have time to think about it. James, a scientist. Henry...we can just hope that he's not doing something dangerous, and Lucas said he just wanted to be himself. I think that's the perfect answer. We should all have that answer.

Oh snap...that's finished!

Four wonderful words. We're done with training. Holy crap, I feel like this is a huge step forward because we have worked so hard to get here! We still of course have to get our homestudy completed but after 40 hours of trauma, neglect, sexual abuse, CPR, first aid and psychotropic medication training I feel like we've accomplished a really big step. We met a few other families on Friday who were in very similar situations with young biological children and they were also fostering to adopt so it felt really good to feel like we weren't the only ones out there. It's really easy to feel like you don't have support but it's been really important to us to keep in contact with our agency, and they've been great so far. We're also really thankful for the prayers of our friends family as we went through our training so THANK YOU!!! So here's the deal....

Since we're fostering to adopt we have a couple of choices of what we could do. The first option is straight up fostering. The goal of fostering is reunification with the parents so we're 100% sure that we're not going to be doing that. Another option, would be for us to be in the "legal risk" program where the goal of the placement would be finding adoptive parents but there would still be a period of 18-22 that it could take for the parental rights to be relinquished. The last option is for emergency placements. With emergency placements you can just get a call, no knowing anything about the child, and it they try to figure out the plan for the child while they're in your custody. We're thinking right now, we'll be doing legal risk since it would give us the best option for a placement to stick. Next step is we schedule our fire inspection with the county and get our homestudy scheduled. We'll be ready to roll end of October...can't believe it. Keep up the prayers that everything goes as planned and we don't have any hiccups! High five everyone!!