Wow, what a crazy and hard year 2020 was for everyone!! The pandemic has thrown us some curve balls, like everyone else. But yet, God has sustained us.
It has been awhile since we posted! Let me catch you up:
1. Our private infant adoption home study was approved in Jan20 and we immediately started planning our Trivia Night fundraiser, due to the extensive costs. When Covid-19 hit hard in the US in Mar'20, our Trivia Night planning came to a screeching halt - the pandemic just felt like a bad time to try to do fundraising, with so many hurting financially and physically, so we searched for other means of funding our adoption.
Thankfully, we were both able to work from home, and our church was able to have online services, and our family stayed healthy, so the impact of Covid on us was not as significant as others. We are so grateful for that. ❤️
2. We were able to refinance our house in Feb'20 for a lower payment and cash in hand, which enabled us to afford to hire our Christian Adoption Consultant, Dawn Wright in Apr'20! She has been awesome to work with! She emailed us several birth mom situations to consider.
3. We were not approved for any of the grants we applied for, but we did find an adoption loan that we could afford to help us to fund our adoption without fundraising!
4. Our oldest boy moved home from college in Mar'19 due to Covid-19 and struggled with severe anxiety, so we spent quite a bit of time supporting him through that. Thankfully, he's doing better, slowly but surely.
5. The death of George Floyd and the resulting social unrest in our country really opened our eyes to the horrible treatment that our black friends are STILL experiencing after all these years. It's sad that it took all of that for us to have difficult conversations with our friends, read books and articles about white privilege, follow black authors and speakers on social media, listen to heart-breaking stories of racism still happening (whether we see it or not), and learn how to truly love our black friends and community. We also considered whether it's responsible for a white couple to be open to adopting children of other races with all the social unrest. After much consideration and prayer, we came back to our original belief that God knows which child is best for our family so we will continue to leave it in His very capable hands (as well as the birth family's). The good thing that came of this time of reflection is that we are now much more aware of the challenges that we could face, are more prepared, and more certain that our diverse church community, friends and family would be there to support us. We have some awesome people in our lives. ❤️
6. Scott got a new job as the supervisor in his department, which meant a lot more hours and stress, but also a bit more income, which will help with paying for our adoption! This also meant I needed to do more around the house to support him, including yard work, meals, and helping with our boys.
7. We had a HUGE oak tree blown over by a storm in our back yard which took us, our neighbors, and neighbors' friends months to clean up! It destroyed our fire pit we worked so hard to create, and tore up part of our shed, but it didn't damage anything inside the shed or our house! And no one got hurt! Could've been much worse! We finally got the fire pit put back together in time for fall bonfires. We had lots of fire wood to burn 😊
8. In Sep'20, Andrea decided to take a voluntary separation from a company she worked at for over 19 years due to massive reorganization company-wide. She spent months soul searching and debating this life changing decision, working with recruiters to fine tune her resume and search for a job in the difficult pandemic job market. 4 months later and after 5 interviews, she finally got a great job and started in Jan'21 She became extremely busy getting up to speed, but was grateful to be employed.
10. Our oldest fur baby Finley passed away pretty quickly in September, which was heart-breaking! He was such a sweet boy. He soaked up lots of Andrea's tears about infertility over the years. He passed peacefully in his sleep with his mama laying by his side. She's so grateful she got to spend lots of time with him during his last couple of weeks.
8. Our awesome next door neighbors moved to Texas! We were so sad to say goodbye but happy that they were able to move closer to family. They gave us a new free standing porch swing for our fire pit and we gained some awesome new neighbors and their dog Lulu who is our youngest fur baby Bonnie's new BFF! God works everything out for good.
11. We used some of Andrea's severance pay to buy a new camper! We bought our truck 3 years ago to haul a camper and were so excited we could finally afford to buy a camper so we can camp comfortably with a little one someday. We also planned to use it to travel wherever we adopt our child, so we figured it would save us on travel expenses.
12. Andrea decided to start selling Pampered Chef products in Nov'20 so she could get discounts on all the things (budget-permitting) on her wish list and have fun socializing and meeting new people. Covid has been really hard on her since she loves to connect with people, so this is a fun outlet for her.
13. We had to get our home study updated since it expired in Jan'21, and finally got it completed in Mar'21.
14. We finally submitted our applications to 2 of the agencies our consultant recommended for us in Mar'21! What a paper intensive and personally invasive process that is! They now know more about us than most of our family and friends do, haha!
15. In May'21, after 2 years of trying to get our ducks in a row to adopt and receiving countless birth mom situations to review that didn't suit our preferences, and no movement from the agencies we applied to, we were starting to give up hope, when out of nowhere, the Lord popped an idea in Andrea's head: what about embryo adoption? We could control the prenatal environment and we wouldn't have to worry about tracking down the birth father for approval of adoption plans or birth mom changing her mind at the last minute. The more we looked into it, the more benefits we saw, and we realized that this may be the best way forward for us. We are so excited!!
In a nutshell, embryo adoption is where we would adopt the frozen embryos, which are fertilized eggs, from a family who had leftover frozen embryos from their IVF (in vitro fertilization) treatments and are done building their family. We would then transfer the embryos to my body and I would hopefully grow the baby and give birth to our adopted child! There's so much more to this but this post is getting too long!!
Stay tuned for our next post on embryo adoption!!
