Decision

As a kid, Nat said that she would like to adopt if she only had boys. On a study abroad to Asia, I met the CFO of Apple Asia in Singapore and learned about his charity work in Asia and his families’ decision to adopt a girl from Southeast Asia. This was our first serious discussion about adoption.

When we struggled again to have children after our second son, we thought and prayed seriously about adoption. When I was talking with one of our church leaders (stake president) about his four sons, I mentioned that my wife would want to adopt a girl if we had four sons. Through much prayer and pondering, we started researching adoption. We had many examples in our local congregation of adoption, domestic and international. I had visited China during the study abroad, for business, and had taught some Chinese people the Gospel while serving as a missionary in Japan in the early 90’s. Nat kept seeing and talking to a mom and her adopted Chinese girl (Lucy)– at the store, swimming lessons, library, etc. We invited their family over and they shared they’re experience and videos of adopting from China. She kept meeting others who had or where in the process of adopting also. Good friends of ours adopted a son from the Ukraine, and were in the process of adopting 2 boys from Russia. We met a family down the street with our same last name that was adopting from China (with two boys). We received our answer to prayer many, many times that we should adopt – in small ways, line upon line.

We tried to adopt through our church social services but were told that we probably wouldn’t be chosen because we already had two kids. We tried foster to adopt, but even with repeated calls, our contact wouldn’t ever call us back. We met one agency and research many different countries and agencies. We decided on China because we would be guaranteed a girl, the process seemed well organized, and we loved the Asian culture. The Lord was patient getting through to us.

We started the paperwork to adopt from China June 2007 and completed all the paperwork and got on the list to adopt in November 2007. Only then did we find out that adoptions for healthy children in China had slowed to very small few and we’d have no hope in adopting soon. We became discouraged and couldn’t make up our minds if we should adopt a child with special needs. Nat was mentioning this discouragement to a friend and talking about the traditional adoption and the special needs adoption, she told her that maybe the reason why we kept thinking about special needs adoption was because that was our answer to our prayer about what to do. Lots of times our prayers are answered through someone else!

We focused on having our own children. In November 2008, we were blessed with our third birth child, a girl! She was born eight weeks early and spent her first three weeks in the hospital. Nat had a difficult pregnancy. It was hard to bring her into the world. When we found out that she was a girl, we were so excited that the girl we were adopting would have a sister! We still had good feelings about adoption, but discouragement with the slow progress in China. So, we let our adoption approval paperwork expire, thinking that we’d have plenty of time to reapply later.