Too Many Sugars

All week Cam keeps saying "too many sugars" which probably refers to the crazy amount of candy and other goodies that our kids consume during VBS..I'm sure it has nothing to do with why people are a bit crazy with the lack of sleep and increase in sugar consumption!

Caleb was supposed to spend the week as team captain for the boys (we were collecting funds to support one of our missionaries) but God had other plans as he spent 6 days terribly ill with a 102-103 temp.  Thankfully his fever finally broke and he is back to functioning today!  Instead Christian stepped to the plate and took his role..knowing it would lead by the end of the week to spaghetti being dumped on the losing team captain's head (the girls always win due to some benevolent ladies in our church who come to the rescue at the last minute!)  I was proud of Christian this week..not only for handling with maturity a role as leader but also for his love and help around our home, picking up for Caleb's many jobs and doing it with a joyful attitude.  Chelsea stepped out of her comfort zone when she agreed to this "up front" role as girls' team captain and did it Chelsea style..by nurturing and thanking the kids as they gave to her bucket.  This week was one of those great reminders that God always has a plan..even with the interruptions in our lives.

I was thinking that this morning when my treadmill gave me the signal that it was no longer going to function unless I lubricated the belt (which is a Daddy/Caleb job!).  At first I felt frustrated by the change in my plans, but then I thought some about blessings and what God wanted me to do with the interruption...and decided that after 4 days of VBS, Corey was needing some stroller/outside time, I knew it had been a while since I'd had a long talk with Chelsea and the morning was less humid than previous days so we could take the mile loop around the park near our house.  It turned out to be a great thing for all of us and a reminder too of God's plans always being better than ours!

IKEA to the rescue!

As if I needed another reason to love IKEA....but we finally had our indoor swing installed by a talented friend last week and it's been PERFECT!  It can hold up to 200 lbs but we've made it just for little kids in our house! It is such a great swing because it's like a cocoon and Corey especially loves being "stuck" in it...it keeps him swinging a lot longer than he'll submit to at OT because it isn't a platform where he can wildly throw his body.

We love the input for him to help him calm down!  We did opt to use a big pillow in the bottom instead of the blow up cushion since we accidentally overheated it with a hair dryer while blowing air into it :)  We think the pillow works just fine!

Our Snowflake Miracle (part 3)

We were blessed in this process to meet our social worker, who by God’s providence, had adopted three children from Korea who were now teens and adults which gave us an instant good connection. We felt that as she got to know our family that she began to fully support us and at the end of our homestudy visits, reminded us that our close family and friends would surely understand this extension of our heart for the fatherless.  Our homestudy progressed rapidly with a few bumps along the way. 

We had been praying that we could have approval by Chelsea’s 17^th birthday or else she would have to be fingerprinted as an adult (and the nearest fingerprint places are hours away…actually so is Target… but that’s a story for a different day!).  Our FBI fingerprints at one point went missing and our homestudy was complete and ready for approval.  We kept praying and asking God to help them be found and He did it step by step, bringing in quickly all of the necessary documentation.  Then on May 2^nd we received a surprising email that our homestudy agency director was questioning our income and family size and that our approval was in danger.  We had seen the hand of God in our process and knew that He had been opening doors that we could not open on our own and had given us faith to keep on walking.  We prayed like crazy and invited others in the adoption community to know quickly of our story and to be our prayer warriors.  It is hard to describe what it feels like to be in that position..knowing God has full power to answer you..but knowing His will may be different than what you ask of Him.

My heart identified that day with Abraham as he climbed Mt Moriah…and I imagined he cried too as he realized that God was asking him to sacrifice his dream for the One who had placed it in his heart.  Through tears I declared that I loved the Lord more than any dream He had placed in me and that He will provide.  I had to be willing to lay it down and not hold it so tightly and God gave us strength.  The morning of May 3^rd I prayed and called out for friends on facebook to pray without being able to share our amazing story and friends prayed without even knowing what I needed prayer for.  I was so blessed to have their support and love.  That afternoon I had planned to meet with another pastor’s wife who shared our heart for adoption and to tell her the details about our story..only suddenly our story didn’t look like it was going to end well.  I decided that I wanted to still tell the story..to say that God is faithful and He has been good and done miracles even if it all falls apart today.  Well while I was meeting with her, God heard the prayers of His kids..and he answered!!!!!  I came home to an email saying that the director had decided to grant us approval on the basis of the positive recommendation of our social worker.  THANK YOU JESUS!  He is able to do more than we think or ask.

Today we’ve decided to share our story and our only desire is to share that God is great and He is doing something using us when we are so undeserving.  I pray that by opening up and sharing the personal details of our family’s adoption journey through the miracle of embryo adoption that others will see Him and Him only.  While I’ve been tempted to hide it in secret because it is personal, we have decided to share so that others will see Him and that our lives may touch many through God’s story.  We invite you into our journey with us.  I don’t know why He’s chosen weak people like us to walk this road.  We are not crazy, we are not brave, we are not worthy….just willing.

We have been officially matched with our genetic family and are filling out legal paperwork that will allow us to move the embryos in their frozen state to our clinic in St Louis.  In the eyes of the world, these embryos are just property so unfortunately that is how they are viewed.  Because we are working with a Christian organization that values them as life, we are also completing additional steps to adopt them and to maintain an open relationship with the genetic parents in the future.   Just this past week I tearfully read the stories of the genetic parents as well as looked at pictures of the genetic sibling twins that were born 7 years ago and had multiple medical issues.  We continue to pray and trust God through this process and felt His peace in accepting them officially.

So what is next?

Soon I will begin a medical protocol to prepare my body for them which involves a variety of medicines.  We hope to then have them transferred to me late this summer (only up to 2 in case you are wondering! We will refreeze those that survive the thaw but are more than the 2 we are willing to implant at one time..I am too old to risk triplets!).  We pray that God gives us the desire of our hearts that these embryos survive the thawing process and that they live and grow.  We still have a long road ahead of us and covet your prayers for our family during this exciting time.  I am 40 years old and cannot believe that God has chosen me to be the mom to snowflakes who live in a vial in the Midwest J  For all these months I have felt a bit like Mary and have silently treasured all these things in my heart..but today I share because God is so amazing that I cannot keep silent any longer.  Thanks for reading about our amazing snowflake journey!  To God be the glory..great things He has done!

PS If you’d like to know more about embryo adoption, please visit www.embryoadoption.org to have your questions answered!

Our Snowflake Miracle (part 2)

Suddenly we found ourselves in the midst of paperwork for two agencies.  The following week another fear hit us…it was a lot of money to risk especially since the statistical chances of this actually working are not high.  We were presented with a different option but still felt drawn to “our” embryos and the way God had opened doors that only He could do.  As we prayed, God did another miracle and we received a scholarship that paid for a lot of our fees.  We will never forget that God knew our fears and our needs and met them so perfectly!  Again we thanked God for His confirmation that He was with us and that we should keep on walking this road…

The month of April was filled with many meetings for our homestudy process and medical clearances.  I needed medical clearance on three levels..my regular doctor, my ob/gyn and then a fertility clinic.  By God’s providence, we lost our doctors here all at one time due to some changeovers in February and God did a miracle just months ago by allowing a family doctor to be willing to take on our whole family at his practice.  Because of this changeover, I had all 8 physicals for all of us done right around the time we began the adoption process…just another evidence of the hand of God.   We had a bit of a medical scare after our ob/gyn visit and were left waiting for another week before we would see the fertility doctor and have an ultrasound.  That week was filled with a ton of “what ifs” in our heart as I truly thought I may never have this chance to carry these embryos if what we feared was true.

At our church, our book of the month is “From Good to Great in God’s eyes” by Chip Ingram.  When I shared our story with a dear friend in the church, she remarked that we were living out this book…taking great risks for God.   The morning we left at 6am for St. Louis for the clinic, I told Rick “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything great right now”…my stomach hurt and I was scared.  Entering the waiting room of the fertility clinic was like walking in a sacred place…I sat in the silence as I watched other women there and prayed in my heart for them and that God would help them in their pain.  I almost felt out of place there and did not know what to say to anyone as we sat and prayed for God to make His will clear on this visit.  Finally, another woman broke the silence and shared her story..she was in full time ministry and wanted me to know she was praying for me after she saw me reading “Dream Great Dreams” chapter of the book by Chip Ingram.  We shared our story and how we came here and she reminded us as our name was finally called that she was praying for our journey and we told her we’d do the same.  It was neat to sit there and in our nervousness (she had flown from far away to be there by herself while her husband was overseas) to affirm that God had ordained this day for each of us and He was going to be there with us no matter what the doctor said.  Our fears were quickly calmed as our doctor, a Jewish man, calmly and excitedly asked us to share our story of embryo adoption and then reaffirmed our faith in God and our desire to “be fruitful and multiply.”  He assured me of full medical clearance based on the tests I had had that morning.   We just had perfect peace that this is the place God had led us.  As we went over some details with the nurse later she told us that they wanted to know more about embryo adoption.  As a pro-life clinic they work hard to assure that there are few embryos created that are not used in procedures but they were interested to hear our details.  She also then smiled and told us that our story was amazing and we should share it with others…we were beginning to think so too!

We had been gone for 12 hours and rejoiced in God’s green light for medical clearance and leading us to this doctor.  We were fingerprinted on the way home and celebrated this day good day with our kids when we arrived home.

Our Snowflake Miracle (part 1)

It’s hard to start a story so wonderful and amazing and full of God’s power when you are in the middle of it and wanting to share with freshness the journey with others to catch them up to speed!  Most people reading this know we share a heart for orphans and God has blessed us with 3 special treasures from South Korea in addition to our homegrown teenagers who are a delight to our lives.  Our family went through a period of transition to a new ministry in Illinois in 2010 but still kept praying for open doors for us to adopt again.  Unfortunately the state we live in is not very large family friendly and so we were a bit discouraged to realize that there were many closed doors for our family due to our size here.   We kept seeking the Lord but had no peace about any of the options before us.  It was sometimes more difficult to wait on Him than it is now to follow Him.  I often asked the Lord to answer or to take away the desire in my heart not knowing He was about to work in a way I never thought possible.

In March, a miracle was about to happen.  Through an amazing set of circumstances we became aware of a set of frozen embryos (affectionately known as “snowflake babies”) that needed adoption.  We received an email about them and at the end, it said “if God is tugging at your heart” please call us.  While we were not unfamiliar with embryo adoption, we never knew that there would be a need for families like us.  For those who are unfamiliar with embryo adoption….basically couples who use IVF procedures to assist them in having children, sometimes have extra embryos that are preserved by freezing for future use.  Unfortunately sometimes circumstances in their lives make it necessary for them to make a decision for their extra embryos.  The choices are:  destroy them, donate them to science (therefore destroying them) or donate them to another family.   We believe that embryos are life with potential and NOT potential life and that adopting them is both right and pro-life. 

 Rick said that just that morning he had been reading about embryo adoption (which was neat how God had worked) and we both agreed that we should ask some questions and see if God was leading.  When we called the agency to ask more questions (all the while shaking) we were given the names of two homestudy agencies that might help us and two clinics that might also be able to answer some more questions.  I called both sets and God clearly laid out which agency was to do our homestudy and which clinic was the right one.  We prayed some more and then it hit us how crazy this would be.  I am 40 years old…what person decides to offer their body to be used, should God chose, to carry these embryos.  And I thought of Romans 12:2 which talks about offering our bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord and could imagine no better way.  We both were hesitant to keep going and tried to talk ourselves out of it all!

The next day we got an email from the agency that basically said “you won’t believe this but…” and then proceeded to tell us about a genetic family that had four embryos ..and they were half-Korean and at risk for special needs and they thought that this was the situation designed by God just for us.  Can you imagine a creative God who is able to provide a special gift that we could not even have imagined but is so perfect for all that God has done in building our family thus far????  We were in shock and recognized the hand of God.  In faith we asked for them to consult the genetic family to see if they would proceed with us and they did….

Courtship and other fun

I've been awfully quiet for a long time on my blog..but that is mostly because we've been in the middle of a unique adoption opportunity and I haven't been able to say anything just yet!  Well then God began to do some other amazing things and a young man who we've been friends with since he and Chels were a baby, came to us and asked for permission to court our daughter.  His family was coming to visit us and we made plans to surprise Chels..I think her feet have not landed on the ground since he came with flowers and candy and a letter just days ago.

I am in awe this Sunday as I sang in worship..to think the God of the universe cares so much about me and my family...to do so many amazing things all at once in our lives!  Chels has prayed so much for God to answer her in this area and so it's a joy to watch His love in our lives!  We are one month from graduation from high school with really only one economics test to go so we have much excitement going on here!

I love watching my daughter and our younger children explain "courtship" to those in our family and to our friends.  I guess for those interested...we see it as a unique opportunity to build a relationship with someone..one where both families agree that they are ready for this step in their lives and very unlike modern dating.  Although our particular couple is younger, they live at a distance and have known each other all of their lives.  Both families are heavily involved but the agreement to enter the relationship was begun by the young adults involved... the goal for them is marriage should God direct that way and there is heavy supervision for the couple to keep them protected.  We have never seen this modeled (except maybe the Duggars!) and we realized that our families had to come up with the way God is directing us to go in this area.  Honestly we are still working out as we go with great communication between the two families about many things.  It has been neat to see the two of them talk and begin to share about things with each other.  We are excited to see how God will lead them and help them.  We truly cherish his family as our dearest friends and can't believe that our kids are beginning to see in each other the potential for future mates.

I look forward to sharing other news soon!  There seem to be many showers of blessings at one time in our lives and we are so grateful to God.