Part 1

Every year I share our adoption story. I love it. It strengthens me to see the Lord's hand in my life. It makes me know that things WILL turn out the way they are supposed to whether it's what I had in mind or not. But, it is a pretty long story. Even the shortened down version, (which you can find HERE if the suspense is killing you and you just can't wait any longer) is super long, so I decided to break it down a little bit for you. From now until the end of the month I will post all four parts of our story for you to read. And here's part 1...

First of all I have to tell you that I believe in miracles. I don't think I did before, but now I can't deny them. That is something that you must understand before beginning, or the beauty of the adventure will be lost on you. 
About a year after we were married we started trying to get pregnant. It just wasn't happening. Around that time a lot of our friends were getting pregnant. While we were happy for them, our hearts broke each time they would complain about how hard pregnancy was, or staying up all night with a crying baby, or the cost of a new baby on a college student's budget. Those were real pains for them, but they were pains that we would have given our right arm to have. We went a little crazy for a while. I worked at a daycare, and honestly, no exaggeration, I considered stealing a baby who was under-cared for at home, one night when her mother failed to pick her up for two hours after we had closed. I literally planned the entire thing out, from where I would hide her to what I would tell the cops. On a separate occasion we lost some good friends who were expecting their second baby. The first one was a girl, and they were talking about what the next one would be. The father said, something rally insensitive about if this one was a girl he would send it back. Troy honestly offered to buy it if  it was a girl. He wrote out a check and everything. This pain was making us insane, and we knew that we had to do something about it. So we did some medical digging and found out that we wouldn't be able to have children. It was heartbreaking in a way I can't even describe to hear that news, but to me, at least then we had an answer. We were no longer waiting around hoping. We knew we couldn't get pregnant the way most people do, so now we could have a plan of action. We learned all about our options, and we had several. We prayed about what to do and had to make some big decisions. Finally, we just knew that adoption was the right choice for us. Troy, and I had decided to keep our situation a secret from everyone until we had a handle on it. We didn't not to tell our parents that we were looking into adoption until we had already gotten started, so we were looking around for an agency that we liked. We thought we had decided on one, and I was getting ready to send in our paperwork when one Monday morning I had the feeling to tell my mom about it. I called her and told her, and she surprised me by saying that she knew where my baby was. My dad is in the high counsel in their stake back home, and in his meeting the day before the stake presidency presented them with a strange situation. They had received two memos about children who were up for adoption. They don't usually get info like that, so they didn't know what to do with it, and took the problem to the high counsel to figure out a solution. My dad hadn't paid much attention to the specifics, but he thought it was a little boy, and a baby girl, but my mom said she would set out to track down the info for me. I have to say, my hopes were up. I had dreams of how easy it was going to be. Then, when my mom called with the info, all hopes were dashed. Neither child was the baby we were expecting. One was a 13 year old boy with a criminal background, and we knew we weren't at a place in our life to deal with that. The other was a two and a half year old who had been removed from the household for abuse and neglect and had been diagnosed with autism, FAS, RAD, ADHD, and developmental delays. That sounded way out of our league too, so we just decided that it wasn't for us, and went back to our original plan. I had decided to turn our paperwork in to the agency the next day, but all that day I just couldn't get the little boy out of my head. I kept thinking about him over and over, and when Troy got home that night I told him I thought maybe we should look into it a little further. His comment was "Are you CRAZY!?!" and he spent the rest of the night thinking of reasons that confirmed that I was, in fact, crazy. But that night the little boy wouldn't stay out of my dreams. I saw him with our family. I saw his face. I knew that the little boy from the memo was our little boy, no matter how "crazy" it seemed, so the next day I set out to find solutions to all of the problems Troy had presented the night before. I found doctors and agencies and schools to help with his special needs, I found out more about DSPDLDSFS social worker who's name was on the memo. When we told him how we found out about Ethan he was shocked. He had only sent the info to other LDSFS offices in California, and had no idea how it had gotten to a little tiny stake in southeastern Utah. I think that's the point when I finally started to realize all of the miracles that were going on...