Thank you

On Saturday Anthony will have been living with us for 4 weeks.  On November 7th we got THE CALL that his team of caseworkers had FINALLY chosen us as his adoptive family!  Although we had known he was ours since August 17th when the first line of an email from his caseworker read, "Hi Gina, Here is information related to the questions you asked about Anthony. Anthony’s middle name is Daniel..."

As most of you know I prayed for God to give us clarity when it came to his middle name.  It felt like a silly prayer at the time but it was answered so very sweetly.  You see, Daniel is Drew's middle name and when we started talking baby names we decided that each child would have their middle name after someone significant and we would for sure use Daniel.  When we chose to adopt to begin our family we decided we would add Daniel to our sons name as a double middle so he would have that part of his Daddy's legacy.  So, you can see when I got that email how Anthony Daniel settled in to our hearts to stay, forever.  He was meant for us and we knew it with out a doubt from that day forward.

This seems like a great time to say thank you. We had a few of you who NEVER questioned us, never used "if you have Anthony" but always used "when".  When we told you we knew he was ours, my prayer had been answered and we had never been so sure about anything in our lives, you chose to believe with us. The process wasn't going our way and taking longer than it was supposed to and near the end everything seemed to be pointing to the possibility of us never meeting Anthony let alone being his mommy and daddy forever.  We had well meaning people not want us to get hurt, not wanting us to get too attached in case it didn't work out, we even had our caseworker ask us if we had a support plan for if we weren't chosen.  Almost everyone was giving up hope, but we weren't.  And neither were a few of you and for that we couldn't be more thankful.

If you can believe it we even had a few people try and talk us out of adopting at all, especially an older child because of course he would be damaged beyond repair.  I am not going to get into that though because it makes me incredibly angry and I will start using bad words and calling names like, uneducated, heartless and selfish.  Yes, so lets move on.

THANK YOU, you know who you are, you never stopped believing with us, never warned us to guard our hearts or prepare for the worst. You weren't uncomfortable with it being a messy process or the frustration and tears that came along with waiting.  You didn't try and  patch things up with common christian cliche's or suggest we wait differently.  You just believed with us, walked with us and in the end you celebrated with us! 

Here are some of our favorites so far :)

Flowers from Drew's work

First family pics

We are loving baking together!

His first night in his very own bed @ his very own mommy & daddy's house!

Move in day!  Our sweet friends surprised us with this

Snuggling

 Striking a pose? ;)

Painting and giggling with Aunt Kelli

Visiting Evergreen for some Beau Jo's

Cousins