We'll Try To Make This Easy For You

I took the liberty of revealing our oh-so-clever code in the email. We italicized the words of our message, but now I'll bold them as well.

We'll give more detailed information in a later post, but the short version of this is Caleb's birthmom is pregnant and we are adopting her baby. The long version involves a sordid tale of attorney's, adoption agencies, families from states that begin with the letter I and a whole host of emails and phones calls. Stay tuned...

Last summer We were chatting with my bro and his wife about kids and family planning and whatnot. Zack and I made the comment that we wanted our kids to be close in age. We’ve had to wait so long for them that we aren’t interested in spacing them out too much. We don’t like the idea of having an infant in our 40's. Of course, we understand that we are not completely in charge of the process and Heavenly Father will direct and guide our family down whatever path we’re supposed to go down. But if we could choose, we would choose close together. Get those diapers and bottles out of the way as soon as possible! Since we aren’t having kids the traditional way, we think it’s okay to take advantage of a few of the benefits. When you are adopting your kids, you are able to have more kids in a closer amount of time because you don’t have to go by that pesky 9 month time frame. It’s possible our kids could be less than 9 months apart. Our baby girl in Ethiopia could be a testament to that.

Just a few months after we had that conversation, Noah entered the picture. Surprise! We know that confused a lot of people seeing as how we were all waiting for the baby from Ethiopia, but Heavenly Father knew what he was doing. It was just crazy that while waiting for Ethiopia we now had a child from Florida and one from Pennsylvania. Our plan for having our kids close together was going nicely. They are 14 months apart. Not bad. Our only regret is that they will still be 2 years apart in school due to the fact that Caleb was born in August and Noah was born in October.

So, we have two kids close in age now and, as you all know, we are expecting another one from Ethiopia as soon as she’s supposed to come. In our own little planning world, we have decided that the best day for her to be born would be around July 25th of this year. That would place her in the same grade as Noah (which, for some reason, we think would be absolutely awesome) but it would put them about a year apart in age. With the Ethiopian adoption time-frame, that would mean we’d get a referral around September or October and then bring her home by summer of next year. Sounds kind of far away, right? Well, as it so happens, we are not in charge of any of that. The Lord is in charge of our family. He decides who should come and when.

So, it should come as no surprise to anyone when we give you the following news. We have decided to put our Ethiopian adoption on hold for now. We feel very strongly that this is the right thing for our family and are very much at peace. We still plan to adopt from Ethiopia. Just not this year!