Our first Post!

Well I'm not sure how this will turn out since it's my first ever blog post but here we are starting our grand adventure!

A little about us: Shawn and I met in High School. We met Freshman year ('97) and had classes together every year and never noticed each other. Junior year we were both elected on the Junior Class Officers board to plan prom. We ended up going to prom together and the rest is history! Shawn and I dated for 5 years before getting married and have now been married for 4 years.

Now the personal stuff: We always knew we wanted a family and talked about it very early in our relationship. We both decided that one day we'd like to adopt, we never knew it would be our only option to start a family. I always felt there was something wrong but the Doctors always said, "you're too young to worry about that now". I actually had a Doctor tell me " Why are you trying to have a baby anyway, you're only 20, you're too young" I explained that I knew something wasn't right and that I wanted to get a jump on it because I was getting married and wanted to be able to have children. No one listened. Then I got Kidney Cancer. Although the surgery went really well and I did not have to do Chemo or Radiation, it put everything else on the back burner for a couple years. Finally, in 2007 and with my doctor's ok, we started trying to have a baby. We tried pill after pill, injections, needles in my tummy, inseminations, scans, xrays, we even did a spiritual cleansing. Months and months of heartache but nothing worked. We finally decided it was God's way of telling us "Let it be". Instead of praying for a baby, we started praying for acceptance of our situation.

The decision to adopt came easily for both of us. As I said before we had already decided to do it eventually so we just agreed we needed to start in reverse! Adopt first then time will tell what our path will be. After a year or so of going back and forth on what country to adopt from. We choose Colombia! The wait was going to be long (2-3 years) and pretty expensive (30k) but we were ready. We called the agency and requested our packet! As we read though we saw a small caption on the bottom of your paper that said The Marshall Island's were opening adoptions in MN. Shawn joking said "Let's adopt from the RMI (Republic of the Marshall Island's) and I said "we should!" The more we looking into the program, the more we knew it was right for us! It's a beautiful country on the brink of starvation. It has truly been a calling from God to be drawn to these tiny little island's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I PROMISE I'll write less on my next post! I just had to get all the details out before the fun stuff begins!