Officially Sharing the News!!

Okay, so this post will come to no surprise to 98% of you who we have been lucky enough to see over the past month or so. But for the few that live a bit farther I apologize for updating this blog so late. I don't know where April went (more about that in my next post) and this has been on my "to do" list daily the entire month!

Jason and I are extremely happy and excited for the adoption of first child here in just a matter of days! We are also pleased to announce that we are also pregnant and due in October!

Here's the story:

On March 2nd, I asked Jason to bring home a pregnancy test. He asked, "why?" And I said, "I don't know... I just feel like we should take one. I know it is going to be negative, I just want to take one." He said okay. The reason he asked why is because we were no longer trying for a biological baby. After our miscarriage we felt strongly that God was calling us to adopt and I didn't want the emotions of adoption/pregnancy/miscarriage again. So we decided to prevent pregnancy for the first time in years!

That night Jason brings home a test and I go into our downstairs bathroom to take it while he's staying the the kitchen. As soon as I take it I see that it is positive!!! I didn't even wait 30 seconds. I was shocked and just yelled, "Uh, come here!" And Jason (who had actually forgotten that I had gone in the bathroom to take the test came to the bathroom excepting me to be out of toilet paper or something like that) walked in and I just pointed and said, "Is that positive?" We both looked like someone had knocked the wind out of us and he just shook his head yes.

We were quiet for some time. Then my first words were, "If we loose this baby... you might as well lock me up in a crazy ward." Jason didn't say much for a while and then he said, "I don't understand. This is so different from the first time we found out we were pregnant." I agreed. While we were happy... at the same time we were not only shocked (we asked how this happened several times) but also fearful. Loosing Elijah was such a trying time for us in every way. I was not ready to do that again.

The rest of the evening was spent just asking lots and lots of questions back and forth and then praying quite a bit. The next day we went down to the hospital and Jason did an ultrasound on me and yep, there was a little baby there. However, we were still early... 4.5 weeks or so. We then started talking about what we should do about the adoption. Bethany Christian Services do not allow you to adopt a baby if you are pregnant or have had a baby in the past year. We were to tell them if we became pregnant during the adoption process and our names would be taken off of the waiting list. We wrestled with "when" to tell them in case we lost this baby too. We were both a little discouraged because we wondered if we had misunderstood the Lord. Why did we feel so led towards adoption if that wasn't His will?

Those questions were quickly answered because the next day we got a call from Bethany saying that a birthmother had picked us! We were shocked! We told them that we were excited and wanted to continue with this adoption (after all we had been praying that only one birthmother would be interested in us) but that we had just found out that we were pregnant again. And with that, we were told we could not longer pursue the adoption. We were heartbroken and Jason really wanted to fight for this baby. So, we wrote a letter to three staff people at Bethany that we had been working with throughout this process -- and we shared our hearts. Here is an excerpt from our letter:

We cannot fully express just how excited.....and confused we are about the past few days. We were overjoyed last night to receive the call from Kelly. For many months we've been praying every day that a birthmother would choose us and that we'd finally get a chance to "match." Receiving that phone call last night was truly an answer to prayer.
However, most of you probably know by now that we are once again pregnant with a biological baby. We literally found out a few days ago when taking a home pregnancy test and Darby just went to the Doctor's office this morning for blood tests to confirm it. Please understand that we are very early in our pregnancy - approximately 4-5 weeks at most. If you remember correctly, you'll know that this is not our first time to become pregnant. We lost our last baby at about 10 weeks and it was a very difficult time for us. Given our past experiences we feel that there is no guarantee that we will carry this pregnancy to full term, but are obviously now praying for God to protect and nurture our biological baby in the womb.
We do not profess to know exactly what God's will is for us in this situation, but please know that we are still VERY eager to bring an adopted baby into our family and we do not feel that HE has made any mistakes in allowing Alicia to pick us at this time. We believe that we are prepared and capable of raising two infants at the same time in our home if that's what God has in store for us.
We are not pretending that it would be easy, though. After attending the classes on attachment & trans-racial parenting, and after reading so many books on adoption, we understand very well that our adopted baby will require and deserve more from us than our biological baby might need. We are dedicated to that purpose and we sincerely promise both Alicia and everyone at Bethany that we are suited to care for both an adopted baby and a biological baby in our home.
Most importantly, though, we wanted to be honest and forthcoming with all the details of our situation right now. We are trying very hard to walk by faith in this moment of uncertainty, but we are also very scared that we might have another miscarriage AND lose our chance to be matched with Alicia. In essence, it would be like two more miscarriages for us.

We asked for the agency to allow the birthmother to choose if she would still like to place her baby with us even though we are pregnant. They had a meeting (that lasted several hours) and then they came to the conclusion that they would allow the adoption to take place if the birthmother still wanted to press forward. We were thrilled, but we had to read several articles on what is called "artificial twinning" and write our responses for how we plan to handle the challenges of raising two biologically unrelated children less than 9 months apart. Our response was three pages long (single spaced) and after we gave that to the agency -- they passed it along to the birthmother who read the articles and our responses. After reading all of that she said she still wanted to place her baby with us!

We got the call on March 15th - a little over two weeks after our adventure began. This call was to inform us that Alicia, the birthmother, still wanted us to adopt her baby. The social worker on the phone said, "All I can say is that God really must want this baby in your house because this just doesn't happen." We were thrilled and really trusted that this is the baby the Lord wanted all along to start our family.

It was then that we started sharing the news of the adoption, but continued to keep the pregnancy a secrete for another few weeks. We are currently 15 weeks pregnant and all seems to be going well. We continue to be a little bit scared of loosing this baby, but trying to have faith. It is also nice to have our first baby (due this month) to take our minds off the worry. :)

We're not sure what God wants for our family, but we're excited for the prospect of these two children joining our family!