Our Family’s Path to Adoption: Part 3

Hello, friends! I’m continuing today with our adoption story. In Part 1 I explained a little about our family and why we decided to pursue adoption. Part 2 shared how that pursuit took a turn into foster and respite care and I left off with us thinking this was where God planned for us to stay.

This is the point in our story where, out of consideration of my son’s privacy as well as the privacy of others involved, my details will become less detailly so please forgive my vagueness in some of this area.

Sometime during the year that we were providing respite care, we got involved with a group home for children. Our Bible study group had volunteered a couple of times with babysitting the children and now our family was becoming more involved on a more regular basis, and we were even allowed to be a host family. This meant that when a little one needed a break from the full house for a weekend or maybe just an afternoon of specialized attention, we were allowed to provide that.

For instance, at Christmas we got to keep a precious baby boy. Oh, he was such a scrumptious little 2-month-old angel baby and we got to keep him for 2 glorious weeks. He was the sweetest little bundle to have with us on Christmas morning and we got to take him to our extended family’s for Christmas lunch. I remember the day we were supposed to take him back I stalled all day long even though we’d see him again each time we were at the children’s home. We only kept this baby in our home that one time, but we always remember that Christmas we had him.

But there was another little guy in particular who became a frequent visitor in our home and along on our family outings–an energetic, hilarious, Mr. Personality! He spent Easter and other special holiday weekends with our family. We picked him up for park days, picnics, strawberry picking, and ice cream runs. These were such sweet and fun times! He got wonderful care and nurturing from the staff at his group home, so he was never lacking in love (In another post I’ll gush over the most wonderful people who cared for him there), but yet he was desperately needing to experience a mommy/daddy/sibling family unit in a single-family home. He’d had no understanding of that concept but was becoming aware of other children at his preschool who would refer to their mommies and daddies. One of his house moms told us one day, “He’s looking everywhere for who he belongs to.” It was to the point of him asking strangers, “Are you my mommy?” or “Are you my daddy?”

But then.

(Get the tissues ready.)

We dropped him back off at the children’s home one day after hosting him for the weekend and it was later reported to us by one of his house mamas that he strutted in and said just as proud and as sure of himself as he could be, “Well, Mr. Joel is my daddy!”

To make a long story short, over the next months, his situation took a turn to where he needed permanency and because we’d formed a bond with him, we were allowed to petition for adoption for a number of reasons I can’t go into here. After several more months of waiting and working out legal details, we were granted parental rights and then eventually were allowed to legally adopt him! He was 3 1/2 years old, and he was our little boy! We could NOT believe how God wrote this story for our family!

But really, our adoption story doesn’t just end here. I don’t mean that there was another unexpected turn in the road. I mean that our day in court when the judge tapped his gavel declaring us his legal parents was not the final step. There was more work to be done and I’ll share more about that in upcoming posts. But for now, that little boy is a big 11-year-old who is growing daily in stature, knowledge, and faith, and we know God has great plans for the rest of his life!