Hello beautiful people. I just wanted to quickly update and say that after only 48 hours after our profile being put online, we were matched! However, I have to say, that our profile had nothing to do with it. The agency actually picked us for this couple. But more on that to come in another post. We are so very happy and excited about this news. We found out yesterday. I will write a longer post soon with more details but for now, I can say that God's hand is in this for sure!
Oh and by the way..................it's a ..............BOY! The babies due date is February 5th :-)
Be in prayer for us as a family, and for our witness to this precious couple. Pray that we would show them God's love. Pray for the safety of this precious boy.
It's a.......
What drives us?
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately on the "decision" of adoption. For the past few weeks I have been battling (again) the fears of what may or may not come of all of this. I think to myself..
What if it all falls apart? What if we get matched and the mom changes her mind? What if they call us with a child with severe special needs? Will we walk in faith enough to choose to say YES to that situation? What if...............
But as with all things in my life over the past few months I have been choosing to not set my fears in front of me. What I mean by that is that they may float around in my head, but Christ will not let them settle in my heart. Still there are times where the mind goes a mile and minute, the heart starts to race, then..........
"Let it go Beloved, it was never your decision to begin with. It was mine. Give your burden to me"
Such sweet comforts our God whispers, does He not? And so again I let it go. Yet with all this thinking, heartache, money, worry, time, and waiting, I can't help but ask "What is driving us to do this?"
I know we have been asked on more than one occasion "Oh your adopting? Well that will be nice to have a baby in the house again. Three is really a nice number of children"
I can tell you right now definitively that "having a baby in the house" or having "three" children as opposed to our two, is NOT, I repeat NOT motivation enough for Jake and I to adopt. Don't get me wrong, adoption is precious, but Jake and I would have given up a long time ago if our motivation was as simple as that. No, lately as I wait, I know more than ever what drives us.
HIM.
He is the creator of all things, lover of all things, and protector of the helpless. What is more helpless than humans? What human is more helpless than a child?
It is His love that works itself in our hearts through His spirit to move us ever closer in this direction. I recently had the amazing privilege of hearing Katie Davis founder of Amazima ministries speak at a local church. She said something in a video they played before she came out to speak that has really stuck with me. She said that sometimes people tell her how lucky she is to know Gods plan for her life at such a young age. She said something along the lines of "Well I'm not "lucky". God's plan for everyone is in the Bible. It says in the Bible to love your neighbor as yourself. Well myself doesn't like to starve, so therefore I shouldn't want others to starve". Katie does more than help the starving people of Uganda. At 21 years of age she has also adopted 14 precious little girls that she is raising by herself.
I feel like that about adoption. My flesh wants to turn away from this whole process sometimes. I want to run back to our easy life of two independent older children. But my Spirit cries louder than my flesh. It cries out to nurture and care for those who have no family. Katie makes such an excellent point. If I am to love my neighbor as myself, well anyone who knows me knows that I hate to be lonely. Do I ever want any child to be without a family when I could be their family?
This is what drives us. When we are in the Word and in prayer, we know His will for our lives is to always live sacrificially. Something I know I have not lived. But I pray Christ will forgive me and help mold me into a person who lives for His glory and lives for my neighbor. Every time I want to give in to fear and quit on this whole process, the Spirit urges on softly...
"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." I want to care for the Orphan because He does.
I was once an Orphan as well. Yes, I had a Mother and Father, but I was as lost as an orphan could be. Then He came. Adopted me as his child, and my life has never been the same. I love how it is put in John 14:18 as Jesus is speaking to His Disciples "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you."
Praise God he has come for us! Let us then press forward and come for those who are also in need.
Making hand soap.
About a year ago a few good friends of mine and I got together and made bar soap. It was a wonderful time of learning, fellowship, and well....soap making! I felt slightly old fashioned and very frugal, both of which were good feelings :-) I still have that soap and sadly we are down to our last two bars. However, making the soap was a lot of work, and buying the initial ingredients wasn't super cheap either. But when I read that you can make your own liquid hand soap easy AND cheap, I was in! It really is one of the easiest things I have done. So, in the event that you might not yet be on the frugal, do-it-yourself bandwagon, here is something cheap and easy to get you started. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, this is wayyyyyyyyy healthier than the soap you buy in the store. This can be a completely natural soap with NO chemicals or parabans.
You first start with....
~ a bar of organic (or natural) Castille soap (trader joes, health food stores, even target carries these)
~ a small bottle of Glycerin (super easy to find. I bought mine at CVS)
~ scented oil of your choice (or tea tree oil for its anti-bacterial properties.) OR no oil at all. It is not required for the soap.
As you can see in my picture above, I have a bar of soap, a cheese grater, two small containers for oil and my Glycerin. The two small green bowls holds my Tea Tree oil and Jojoba oil.
Next you grate. And grate. And grate. And grate. When you feel your hands and muscles burn like fire, then suck it up, call yourself a sissy and push on. Your usually only halfway done ;-)
After you grate you pour our grated soap in a pot
Then you cover it with water (a lot of people measure this out, but that's not my style, so I cannot remember how much water I used. Maybe 5 cups??)
Once you have sufficient amounts of water in there, then put it on your stove on low and stir occasionally until all the soap is melted. Mine even turned clear and I thought I had done something wrong like added too much water. I thought it would be gloppy or at least slightly thick. No. That happens over night. It actually turned out that I needed to add much more water than I did because mine became way too thick originally. If this happens to you then just put the soap back in the pot the next day, add more water, and heat on low again. Then let it set overnight and viola, perfect hand soap.
But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, the melting. So while you are starting the melting process and you notice that most, if not all, of your shavings have melted, then add your tablespoon of Glycerin and your oils if your using oils (I used around a teaspoon of each tea tree oil and jojoba oil).
When you are certain your soap has melted, allow mixture to cool down for about 30 minutes then pour into a container. I used a jar, but had I added the amount of water that I should have, which I later ended up doing, it would not have fit in the jar, so be prepared to pour it into something semi-large.
Lastly, let it sit overnight and thicken. When you check it the next day, if it is of desired consistency (kind of like egg whites or thicker), then grab your funnel and pour into old washed out hand soap bottles. I love seeing my new soap that I made for about less than a dollar a bottle, put into containers of hand soap that I bought for $4.50 a bottle. Have I mentioned before how I love the feeling of saving my hubster some money????
The end product should fill AT LEAST 3 bottles with some leftover (I probably could have filled four bottles but I didn't have a fourth bottle, so I had to stick the rest in a jar.
And there you have it.
Oh and by the way, just ignore those insane amounts of crumbs on my table. That was just a trick of photography. They're not really there ;-
Living with health issues.
I have so many blog posts that I have been wanting to write lately. It's kinda driving me crazy that I can't get on the computer more to get them out of my head and on to bloggy world. But every day I say "when I am done with this task I will hop on that computer and get that post written!" And yet, that task leads to another which leads to another which leads.....you guessed it...... to another! :-) But I am NOT complaining. I am joyous, and I will explain way. You see, I am blown away that I am even able to get "tasks" done. There was time, not very long ago, where I was lucky to get my self going each day, and was barely achieving my small goals of keeping the basics running. This was my life for a few years, but increasingly more so over the last 18 months. I will tell you in a moment how God is bringing healing into my life, in more ways than one. But first, I want to go into what it's like to deal with health issues, and to doubt God's goodness in the midst of it.
For the longest time I didn't know what was going on with me. I was noticing differences in my health, but was seeing it as several UN-related symptoms. As many of you know, over 3 years ago, my husband and I felt convicted, compelled, and convinced that we should leave the conceiving of children in His capable hands. We had the Vasectomy reversed and awaited the inevitable pregnancy. It never came. As we went through the first two years we assumed the vasectomy had failed. I became consumed with sadness. I so wanted to have new life in my womb, but none came. We finally went to the doctors to have the semen analysis done. The results......The reversal had worked.
"hmmmmmmm........ This is odd", I thought to myself. I was pretty sure I had two children without any sort of medical help already. How could it be me?? So the tests began. Nothing invasive really. An ultrasound, some blood tests, a dye test. That's when I was diagnosed with PCOS. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. I couldn't have more misunderstood this diagnosis. I was assured by the doctor that this was a minor thing. That likely one day with some medical intervention we would be able to conceive.
Wait, what was that word? "Medical Intervention"? Oh no. We had sort of handed that area of control over to God. Does it go both ways???? Do we let Him decide How many more and also IF we have more?
I talked to my husband that night. He assured me that for him, it did go both ways. We accept it if he gives us "too many" (as we sometimes feared in the beginning) and we accept it if he gives us no more at all.
I can't say that I fully agreed at the time, but I submitted.
I now had a "diagnosis", but still, nothing made sense. My diagnosis was just.....well....a diagnosis. What was that going to do for me? It didn't tell me WHAT was wrong with me. It didn't tell me what I could do about it either. Getting a PCOS diagnosis was like getting told "we're not quite sure what's wrong with you, what caused it, or how bad it will get. We only now it's not good, and it will get progressively worse with age." yay :-/
Over the next year and a half I would gain 50 pounds, have my face wrinkle, grow facial hair, be tired every single day, crave sugar like a heroin addict, have mood swings, experience blood sugar spikes and severe drops, have heart palpitations every morning when I rise, hot flashes, night sweats, have my face cover itself in brown spots, headaches, joint pain, night time swelling of my arms and hands, and truly the list could go on. I think though I have communicated that overall, I did not feel well. I was stripped of my youthful energy, and my beauty. I am not even sure if I ever thought of myself as beautiful, but regardless of what I thought of myself before, I sure knew that I wasn't beautiful any longer. Dealing with the complete lack of energy was one of the harder symptoms. It was a torturous feeling to watch everything that needed to be done just sit there and not get done, knowing it would be waiting for me tomorrow. Only tomorrow, I wouldn't feel any different that today.
I watched my kids worry about me, and even become lazy for lack of direction and encouragment because I was just too tired or in too much pain to care. I received lectures and judgmental stares from family members and even my husband. I don't blame them really, for none of us really knew what was wrong with me. It's not like they could say "Oh poor Val, she has____(fill in blank with dreaded disease)__ " They would just look at me and say "Val you have to get this stuff done, your house is falling apart the kids are falling behind in school". You just need to pick yourself up by the boot straps and march on. It broke my heart.
For the first time in years my infertility, which had been at the forefront of my thoughts, now took the back seat.
What was wrong with me, I am only in my twenties???I would scream this at first at myself. In my head. Then after of months of praying for healing, I began to yell that at God. I was careful not to let anyone see that pain. I would try and smile around others and wait until I was alone in the shower or driving by myself to the store and then I would unleash it. My own painful dialog would go something like this....
"God, you can heal me, why don't you!!!????"
"Dang it. I'm sorry Lord, that was uncalled for. Maybe I am having another hormonal mood swing. I think I have been getting a lot of those lately."
"Wait a second, you caused me to be this way! If you didn't want me to feel sad and angry and out of control, why did you do this to me?"
"Dang it. I'm sorry again"
"I am just so angry God! Why were you not content to take away my ability to have children? Why did you take my health, my vitality, and by beauty as well??"
All I can tell you is that during those dark months I received a lot of interesting stares from fellow drivers on the road. I can't tell you how many times I have cried and yelled in my car only to look over at a red light and wish really really really badly that I had tinted windows.
Eventually I handed over the infertility. I gave it to God, and asked forgiveness for ever giving it such a high place in my life. I still asked that he would return my fertility one day to what it used to be, but I was content to leave God in control. I even, slow as it was, was brought to the point where I had to become content with my poor health (not to mention saggy boobs and growing mid-section).
I knew if I let this anger consume me I would loose my faith. I would loose everything. I knew my faith was weak, and small, but I still had faith. I knew God was in control, I knew God sent His Son for me. I knew he had forgiven me so much. I knew I was truly blessed. I knew I had no right to be angry at God.
But still I doubted his character and goodness.
I stayed in the word daily but nothing touched my heart as it had before. I kept praying but instead of my prayers drifting to Heaven like incense, they stopped at the ceiling. It had to change.
Slowly but determinedly, I turned my heart back towards God (or maybe HE turned my heart back towards Him). I acknowledged my sin before him, repented, and once again accepted His FULL and gracious forgiveness.
That was the best thing to happen to me in a long long time.
I am now on the road to healing. In more ways than one. First I began to focus my heart on Christ and heavenly things, not on earthly temporal things. Then I began to learn my habits of "blame when pained"(as I like to call it), I prayed often for God's help in the process and still do. Following my change in my relationship with God, I began to seek out better medical help and better answers.
I now understand so much more about my body than I ever thought that I would. After 6 doctors I now see a very knowledgeable doctor who is an MD but also has her degree and licensing in Naturopathy. She has reviewed all my blood tests, and all my samples, and all my symptoms and is helping me find out what exactly is going wrong and what I can do to treat it. It was great to have a doctor spend more than 7 minutes with me and also know what the tests mean.
For one, I have severe hormonal imbalances. When I say severe I mean very very bad. I am also insulin resistant (caused by the hormonal imbalance), have adrenal fatigue, and my thyroid is not working properly.
So here are some things I am doing to help my health,
I am taking natural (not synthetic) Hormone replacements
I am taking a natural Thyroid
I am taking Vitamin D (which I am also severely deficient in)
I drink water first thing in the morning every morning with lemon in it (helps the liver, which in turn helps the Adrenal gland)
I am taking 4 capsules of good quality Fish oil (helps the hormones and thyroid)
I am walking daily
I am not eating refined sugar and have severely limited any other sugars like honey.
Since being on the natural hormone replacements, and vitamins, I have stopped gaining weight for the first time in a year and a half. In addition to not gaining weight I have also lost 5 pounds. The biggest difference I have noticed is my energy. It is amazing to have energy again! I still have a few days here and there where my energy wipes out but it usually only lasts an hour whereas before it would last for 4 hours or more. I just feel overall so much better. The swelling at night has also gone down, my hot flashes are few and far between and I am becoming so much more productive. It has been so great. I can't tell you what a treat it is to get up and have a 1000 things to do and know I just might be able to get them done, or at least try!
Most importantly, by the Grace of God, I am learning to lean on and Trust Him in all things. I am breaking bad habits daily and tearing down walls of doubt.
What I have learned through all this will carry with me for a long time. Top three...
1)Never take for granted your health or fertility. It is NOT guaranteed to always be there, so be grateful while you do have it.
2)God is good. All the time. When we view Him as anything else every trial is a double trial. It is too hard to go through a trial and doubt His goodness at the same time. Nor is it right.
3)There are seasons in life. There is a time for everything under the sun. Yes some things last a lifetime. But a lot of the time if you hold fast with perseverance and patience the reward is great when the trial is over. I wish to God I had persevered with patience and faith. I did not. I still have wounds from those dark times and very bad habits that the Lord is still weeding out of me due to my lack of patience and lack of trust in Him.
I realize that I have once again been very honest in my blog post. And that lends me open to some criticism I am sure. I realize I was vain to complain about beauty, I realize I should have been glad that it was me and not my children suffering (as that would have been much much worse) , I realize a lot of things. But I also know that some people are going through things similar and they need to know that God is faithful. And they also need to know that they are not alone, and that they are not the only ones who think those thoughts and who doubt. I want to offer encouragement through my honesty and also stand as a monument that screams "Do not waste you time blaming God! Turn to him for love and comfort and you will be comforted! Do not give in to anger, it will poison your life."
If anyone would like to talk to me personally about any of this, or just need a listening ear for anything you are going through. I am here. Just email me at sgtswife03@yahoo.com.
No baby....yet.
We are still waiting. Don't worry, I will let everyone know as soon as we get "the call". We are very very excited for that day. And yet, as excited as I am, I am glad it has not happened yet. I have so much to do! I am totally nesting. I never believed that you could "nest" when you weren't pregnant, but I am nesting for sure! I am trying to get everything ready. The call can come any day.
The List.....
~swing by my brother and sister-in-law's storage to pick their baby stuff left over from the twins------check
~pick up the crib from my sweet friend Anh-------check
~clean and wash the bassinet that I got off Craigslist-------check
~organize Ireland's room to make room for baby-------check
Still to do....
~figure out which kind of cloth diapers to use (there's so many choices!!)
~get cloth diapers and formula
~find some uni-sex baby outfits (poor child has NO CLOTHES yet in this house)
~pray for God to prepare my heart with patience and love, gentleness and self control
~get the house in order
~make freezer meals
~be sure to get homeschooling in order so things will run smoothly when baby comes.
~jump up and down and shout praises to the Lord for all the kindness He has shown to us :-)
Update....again.
I think you will be getting a lot of these in the next few weeks and months. As most of you know we just shifted from a very slow international adoption process to a very quick domestic adoption process. We JUST today found out that our current international agency that we have been working with, has agreed to convert our home study from international to domestic. This is huge. We were hopeful in the beginning that they would convert it, but the more we talked to the agency, the more it looked like they would not do it for us. This was told to us by four separate individuals who worked in the agency. My husband looked at me and said "babe, if they won't do it, then we cannot afford to do another homestudy and we will just have to take it as a sign from God that we are to wait longer to adopt and stick with international." Which would mean dropping from South Korea (as we know regardless of which adoption we do, is not a good idea at the moment due to the countries threats of closing the program) and waiting until we qualify for China special needs. My heart sunk. After waiting years just to get to a point to be so close, it hurt to think of having to wait longer. I prayed. Then I finally go a hold of the director of our agency (who happens to sincerely dis-like us :-), and she told me today that she would convert our homestudy........... FOR FREE........ THIS WEEK. It was a MIRACLE. I could say a lot more, but I don't want to put down the agency. Let's just say it was clearly the work of God. Sooooooo the plan is, get the 5% loan we have agreed to get, turn in our money and paperwork to the domestic agency Friday, put together our profile in two weeks, and probably adopt shortly thereafter. I can't believe how fast this is all going. I wouldn't be so excited for the quickness of it all had the lady not told me to prepare to get a child very quickly due to our openness on race and other issues. I was prepared to wait long, and was fine with that. But it is true. So we wait and see. I am picking up my nephews infant carseat that he has outgrown tomorrow, along with some miscellaneous baby things. I have to say, having a 10 and 7 year old sure makes you look around and realize that you have almost nothing for a baby. This should be fun collecting little pieces here and there from friends and family. P.S. if anyone has any good ideas on fund raising to pay off adoption loans, pleas let me know! :-)
updates, updates, updates.
I find it odd and sort of funny that I am in a stage in life that things are changing so much that I am constantly having to update friends and family on the craziness that we call "our life". But I love it anyhow. Apparently God must think I don't like things to be predictable (or he knows I do and likes to throw me for a loop....one of the two ;-) Tonight I will focus the update on the adoption. Later, when I get back from Northern California, I will update the rest of our crazy life and then would love to go back to some topical blogging, The adoption is moving forward, but in a new direction. We received our finalized copy of our Home Study in the mail today ~yay~ and have thus far completed everything needed to move forward in this process. However there is one thing standing in our way. That one thing happens to be very very large. Yup, it's the country of Korea itself. We believe completely that they are shutting down the international adoption program. And rightfully so. They are not a third world county, and have reached the point where they can sustain their own adoptions domestically. They have been talking about this for a few years I guess, but we only knew about it a month after we signed on to adopt from there. Our agency did not tell us anything about it. At all. Not a word. You get my drift. We would soon find out however how truly serious this was. Phone calls to the agency brought no news, they said only "Korea has been threatening this for years, it's not really anything to be concerned about." I believed them.....at first. Now we are getting email updates weekly, about what other families (who are much farther along in the process) are going through. Huge delays (some delays are always to be expected in the adoption process but these were massive), and threats to shut down the whole program. There is much much more to it than that, some of which we are not privileged to discuss, but after much consideration we have decided it is not in anyone's best interest to invest 2 more years, thousands of dollars, and our hearts, to a program that will more than likely shut down right before we are able to actually finalize an adoption from there. We then looked into other countries that our agency offers, and for one reason or another we are not able to do the few they have to offer (several countries are going Hague at the moment and others are having in country turmoil and therefore are temporarily suspended). So we started calling around to other agencies who offered different countries to see if we could switch over to them. I called 6 agencies and every one of them told me that although our home study was just completed, is fully accredited, and legal for use, they would not take our home study as it is their policy to do "their own home studies". As I was calling around and hearing this heartbreaking news, knowing we could not afford to pay for another homestudy only 2 months after paying for the recent one, my heart sank. Then I remembered seeing this adoption agency as I drove down the freeway to see my doctor. I thought for a moment and remembered the name listed on the building. I googled them, gave them a call and asked, without expecting a "yes", if they would take my home study. They asked if it was accredited, I said yes, and they said YES! I told them how wonderful that was and how happy I was to hear that. I then asked "What country programs do you offer for adoptions?". She said "Oh, we don't do international, only domestic." My heart sunk. We had never even considered domestic adoption, and I wasn't sure I was ready to consider it now. I got to talking to the kind lady though and we ended up talking for an hour. I let her know the situation with Korea, our situation with not qualifying for several countries due to age, or travel time or several other reasons. She asked me to come by a week later to come talk about the domestic adoption process and see if I really understood it. I agreed, talked it over with my husband, and went to the meeting a few days ago. We had TONS of questions and they answered them all honestly and openly. We discovered a lot of things we thought wrongly about domestic adoption. For one, we believed that domestic adoption in America was for the rich. Why we thought this, I have no idea. It will end up costing around 10-15 thousand dollars LESS than our Korean adoption would have cost. Secondly, knowing adoption is about so much more than money, we wanted to ask if there was really even a need for us. We had always heard that there was like a 7 year wait list for a baby in America. We assumed that there were all these people who could not have children and only wanted a baby, and wanted one .....well.....primarily white. And since my husband and I were open to children up to 5 and were completely comfortable with children of all the beautiful skin shades of this world, we thought the obvious, and only choice was to do international adoption. The lady informed me that although there are a lot of people wanting to adopt in America, most of them want a healthy, Caucasian newborn, born to a mother with a good medical history. She informed us that there were very few couples who crossed their desks open to children of all races, and of backgrounds with some unknowns. We filled out a questionnaire that asked questions about the baby you would like to adopt. Questions like "what race are you open to?", "would you be willing to adopt a child that is the result of rape?", "do you want a boy or a girl?" . When we answered that we were open to a child of any race, either a boy or girl, and that we were not all that concerned about a child's mothers background, the lady almost teared up. I could not believe her reaction. My thoughts were "How many people are seriously not open to these things??". She answered my unspoken thought the next moment. She said that these were the kind of questionnaires they frame in their office. Jake and I looked at each other thinking "your kidding, right?" We are no hero. We are not even good most of the time. We are selfish, lazy sinners being transformed daily by the power of God and relying on HIS grace to get through each day without falling back into old patterns of sin. BUT, we know the value of a child. That value is not changed by circumstance, color, gender, or abilities. Sooo we told her we were interested and talked about how to start. Here's the crazy part. After we talked about which things to do to get this thing rolling she then said "Normally I ask my clients to get in this paperwork as soon as possible. The sooner your paper work gets on file and your profile gets put out there, the sooner you get matched. BUT since you guys are open to so many variables I would say to hold onto your paperwork until you are absolutely ready to bring home a baby." She said we could be matched within days of posting a profile. W O W. So here we are. Doing a domestic adoption. I never would have thought. Now having said all that, our hopes for helping the least of these are not ending with this adoption. There are so many children in countries sitting in orphanages waiting, that we could not leave it at this. Even though all plans made by man are subject to change, our goal is to adopt a precious baby domestically in America now. Then by the time that child is around 1, my husband and I will BOTH be 30 and will have been married 10 years (two setbacks that work against us with several countries). We hope to then continue our heart for adoption internationally. We should then qualify for several more countries. There's your update. Who would have thought I was going to write a book tonight? sheesh! Other updates to follow soon. Until then, we are off to Northern California for our second vacation in almost 10 years of marriage! We are excited and ready for this break :-)
