Our Journey

Over the past year Nelson and I kept having conversations about our Family. We had feelings that we needed to discuss if our family was complete or not. Everytime we talked about it nothing happened. We never had strong feelings that we needed to get pregnant and have another child. I would often indicate I did not think my body could handle a baby or being pregnant because of all the pain I deal with. We went 8-10 months with our random conversations never really going anywhere.

One day when I was driving to work a feeling came over me that we should look into adopting. I did not say anything to Nelson about it. That night at dinner time he said "I started looking into adoption." It just hit because neither one of us had talked about that before. We started praying and trying to figure out what needed to happen for our family. After fasting we had a strong feeling about it. We felt very lost, had no clue where to even begin. We started researching everywhere around. After we learned as much as we could we felt like going through Foster Care- but with adoption in mind was the best approach. We decided we are not necessarily looking for a baby but someone younger than Asher.

This has really caught us off guard and we are not sure where our journey will take us or where we will end. We have had a lot of mixed emotions and thoughts regarding this. We have gone into this with the mentatility that being pregnant and having your own child is not easy, so we should not expect this will be easy.

In order to look into adoption you have to take 32 hrs worth of class. This was the first road block we ran into. How do you find time for that when you husband is the Bishop and needs to committ time to the ward. He has awesome counselors and they have stepped up to bare the load so we can do this. There have been many things said in the class that have made us think- what the heck are we doing why are we doing this. It would be easier to just get pregnant and give birth to a child.
It then got even more challenging. Sitting in the classes for 4 hours straight was way to hard on my body. I could not handle it. I ended up being in so much pain and shed a lot of tears. I wanted to quit so bad because I could not take it. I found myself in a pretty low.

We decided to press through if we could. I have learned a few things from this. I really think Satan wanted to challenge me and see if I would give up(I have to admit I almost did, I was very discouraged). But because of this it forced me to go to the doctor again to start figuring out what is really going on with me and why I am in so much pain. Through x rays they found that I have degenerative disk disease in my vertebrate (arthritis basically). That is why my muscles are always so tight and always in pain. I had to look at it that if we did not have this experience then maybe we would not have found these things out.

We just finished our home study and continue to wait for the next step. At this point we not sure where our journey will take us or where we will end. We are just trying to have faith and move forward.