My husband and I always knew that we wanted to adopt since we were married 12 years ago. My husband had served a mission for our church in Southern Russia before we met and had the opportunity to serve in orphanages. He saw the conditions there and how much better off those children would be in a family environment. While some orphanages are great with loving caretakers, nothing can replace the love a family can offer. We decided that we would look into adopting after having several children of our own.
We started a family shortly after we were married and were quickly blessed with 2 boys. Shortly after our second son was born I ended up getting very sick, which caused another chronic illness to start that we weren't aware of at the time. From that point on we had trouble with pregnancy and experienced a couple of miscarriages. It was heart breaking because we knew we were meant to have more children. After a few years of trying to have another child I finally went to a specialist to find out why I continued to miscarry. After many tests, I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, that was causing my body to see those little babies as harmful to me, so my immune system attacked them. I also had other problems that made me high risk for having another child. I was put on several medications to suppress my immune system and help my other issues and we were blessed with our 3rd boy. It was a very stressful pregnancy and we decided through the help of prayer that this little boy was going to be our last natural child.
A few years ago, we really began to seriously look into adoption and began saving money for it. We spent last year researching out adoption programs and agencies and we felt strongly that the time was right and that we should look for our children in the Ukraine. We started reading adoption blogs from people who adopted from the Ukraine to get a better idea of how the process works. We were able to find an agency that we felt comfortable with and sent in an application. We were excited to hear that we were approved and we signed a contract with them last week. We are starting this blog to help us keep track of this roller-coaster process and maybe it will help someone else along their way too.
