Last night Drew and I attended an orientation.
If you know us at all you know we love kids and we have even surprised most of you by making it this long into our marriage with out having babies yet! Well, recently we decided we wanted to start our family, we also decided thatwe wanted to do that through adoption. After lots of conversations about what this could/should look like for us we decided to move forward with adopting a child legally free for adoption who is already waiting in foster care for someone to bring them home.
There is a really great non-profit here called Project 1.27. We began the process of becoming certified to adopt out of the local foster care system by attending their orientation and paying our fee to take home a very large application packet :)
Project 1.27 is named after James 1:27
I am going to do my best to keep a sort of journal of this process on here for two reasons. One being my own personal record of dates and stories. Reason number two is to hopefully debunk some myths about adoption.
P1.27 encouraged us to bring friends and family who had expressed an interest in supporting us on this road so we invited a handful of special people in our lives in hope that a couple of them would be able to make it. The odds were stacked against us in our head... the orientation was a good 1hr 20 minutes away and time is a hot commodity in the busy lives of our friends. We knew whether they could attend or not that they loved and supported us so we just threw it out there and were completely overwhelmed when they almost all said yes :)
The cheesy and sentimental side of me couldn't resist taking a picture to remember the night we began this process and who so selflessly drove up and sat through 2 hours of a meeting they didn't have to be at with us. They talked a lot about a support 'team' last night and one thing we can check off our list is one really amazing team :)
That is one reason we knew we could do this, we aren't perfect and are aware of the challenges that lie ahead, but we are incredibly supported and loved. We aren't going to have to walk this alone and look at all the people who are going to love on a kid who thought that no one loved them at all! Another cool thing is that there are more friends and family who for whatever reason it may be proximity or timing weren't able to attend...lets just say we have enough support to share...but we don't wanna :)
And yes, Drew's brother Troy has a frisbee on his head. He's going to be a fun uncle!
