Our Story

Introduction

Welcome! We are so glad you are visiting our blog! Thank you for journeying through the adoption process with us. Read on to find out more about us!

Hi! We are Andrew and Katie, the hopeful parents to be! We met in college, dated two years, and got married! After a year of being married, the dream of adopting began to grow first in Katie's heart, then in Andrew's heart. After discussion and prayer, we both began to feel this was something God was calling us to do. Then began research on countries and agencies and cost and adoption in general. We don't know exactly how it will all happen and when, but we decided to to take a step of faith. If God is calling us to adopt, then He will provide and make it all happen in His perfect timing!

Why Adopt?

Andrew and I want to parent.  We want children and there are 154 Million orphans world-wide.  We thought "Why not give them parents?" God placed the desire in our hearts through his Word and through awareness of the need of orphans. For us, adoption is a loving, joyful act of obedience to God. Adoption is a tangible way to be the hands and feet of Jesus and show His love to an orphan.

"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." James 1:27

"And anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me.”-Matthew 18:5

Why Adopt First?

Whenever someone hears that we are adopting, they usually assume that we have infertility issues.  (Funny how that works.) People choose to adopt for many reasons, one of which may be infertility.  In our case, infertility is not the why we chose to adopt. While we would love to have children by birth, we also want to have children by adoption.   This isn’t a “plan B" for us.  This is "plan A."

Andrew and I decided to adopt before trying to have biological children for several reasons. First, the timing worked well for us. Before we got married, we thought we would start our family after being married for two years. After our second anniversary, we realized that pregnancy did not seem to work with where we were in our lives. However, the adoption time table seemed to fit perfectly. Adoption takes longer than a nine month pregnancy.  By the time our adoption is complete in two or three years, Andrew will have completed his Ma in counseling.  By that time, hopefully, I will be able to stop working outside the home and be a full time wife and mommy.

Secondly, we decided to adopt first because of how the adoption process works. We have a lot of dreams for our future, and adoption was among the list of things that it would be “great” to do one day. We knew that adoption takes a lot of commitment- time, money, and energy. We knew that once we have children it could be much harder to save, fund raise, or spend time on paperwork. Also, we will have to travel to Bulgaria twice for about 10-14 days each time.  It would be harder to make the trips with young kids in tow, but that is a long time to leave kids with family.  It seems more practical to adopt first. It seemed like we needed to adopt now or adoption may never happen!

Some people have asked, “Are you ever going to have your own kids?” Actually, all our children will be our "own" kids, whether they come into our family by birth or by adoption.  Andrew and I don't know what the future will hold for our family. We dream of adopting again either from foster care or internationally.  We would also love to have biological children. The only thing we can plan for right now is our little Bulgarian children that are waiting for us. When Andrew and I dream of being parents, we are dreaming of two children with dark hair, olive skin, and big brown eyes. Andrew and I count it a great privilege and blessing that God is allowing our family to grow through adoption.  We can hardly wait to be parents!

Why Bulgaria?

Every child deserves a loving family. We put all adoption options on the table and went through the process of elimination.

Option 1: Domestic Infant Adoption
We decided this option did not meet the basic purpose of why we wanted to adopt. There are lots of couples who can't have kids waiting for a birth mother to choose them to parent her baby.  We did not want to compete with other childless couples for a baby.  (Domestic adoption of infants is what someone has called the "adoption olympics" - families competing to get the birth mother to choose them.) We want to give an orphaned or abandoned child a family. We decided this was not the route for us.

Option 2: Domestic Adoption from Foster Care
We looked at the possibility of adopting child who is available for adoption, but currently in foster care while waiting for a family.  Of the over 500 thousand children in foster care in the USA, 130 thousand are available for adoption and waiting for a forever family. Most of these kids are school age and older. At the time this option didn't seem a good fit for us. We are definitely open to foster adoption in the future.

Maybe one day we will adopt a child from the foster care system, but for our first adoption, we decided to go a different route to be able to adopt a younger child.

(Note: It is possible to try to adopt a younger child through foster-to-adopt programs, but there is a risk of children being returned to their Birth families - which can be a wonderful thing for the children, but would be heart breaking for us.  We weren't willing to risk the emotional heart ache of attaching to a child only to lose him/her.)

Option 3: International Adoption
As the first two options were out, we took a look at international adoption.  International adoption excited us right from the start.  Was this the route God wanted us to go?  Every country has different rules/eligibility requirements.  Would a country be right for us?  Russia or Kazakhstan? Much too expensive for us! China or Korea? We were to young. Taiwan or Haiti? We hadn't been married long enough.  Bulgaria? Just right!