Izaac

So this is my (Christina) first post and I am sure you will be able to tell because our writing styles are different. I usually make Benj do all the writing because I think it is better and more interesting to read. Anyway, here I go...

I thought I would give an update on how Izaac is doing. He just had his two year check up and everything looks good! He weighs 25.3 pounds, which puts him in the 12th percentile and 34 inches, which puts him in the 30th percentile. His head is 49.5 cm, but didn't tell me what percentile that was. He did a great job even when it was time for a shot. He said ouch and cried for a second but as soon as I mentioned a sucker he stopped! We have been trying to potty train and he has been doing a great job at home, but when he is in the nursery he refuses to tell his teachers he has to go. I am hoping that he will start to tell them soon. Izaac loves reading, coloring, playing play-doh, working at his "workshop", and watching Mickey Mouse Club House. Lately when he wakes up in the morning he is quiet so I can't hear him and he unloads all his clothes out of there bins so he can stack them up to reach higher on his toy shelves. We bought he a step stool so that he would stop unloading them and the next day he unloaded the closet instead. I just never know what his room is going to look like each morning!

I have been asking him if he wants a baby brother or baby sister and he usually picks baby sister! I don't really think he understands what I am asking but it is fun to see what he decides each day.

Here is the Info (For real this time)

Alright, lets see if I can stay on track this time! If you haven't picked up on it yet, Christina and I are adopting a child! We are working with Bethany Christian Services and are adopting an infant from somewhere in the USA. There you go. You now know just about as much as we do...

Okay, I guess I can't really just post that so I'll keep going for a while. This is not a new calling for us but we've finally wrestled up the courage and faith to take the first few steps. I always assumed that when we began adopting it would be internationally. I figured we would be planning to welcome a Ugandan child into our family (and into our Ugandan house), and I still believe we will someday, but it has been made pretty clear to us that, for now, this is what we are suppose to be doing and we are excited about it, really excited about it! Right now we are surrounded by people with adoption experience from a variety of different angles. We are surrounded by support and experience and that has been, and will be, such a blessing throughout this whole process.

So we just sent in the majority of our paperwork yesterday (sincere apologies to the South American rain forest that was sacrificed to make that happen) and are still waiting for our clearances to come back and say that we aren't serial killers or that we never voted with the Green Party or something. I'm not really sure what they are checking for but I am glad they check and don't just give babies to anyone. Once all our paperwork is in, we will have to meet with our case worker a couple times. She'll come to our house to make sure we don't live in a cardboard box (it isn't exactly a cardboard box, we should be okay) and we'll go see her at her office to make sure she isn't selling kids out of the back of a run down Laundromat. (I hate that I'm always so sarcastic. Note to self: work on that) After all that is done, we will finally be placed on the waiting list!! During that time, the first thing we have to do is make a "profile book" that Bethany will show to birth moms so they can get a feel for who we are and hopefully choose us. Also, there is this little detail about raising a bunch of money. We know there will be emotional ups and downs, truthfully there already have been. We can see these hills and valleys as we pray and hope and work for the money to make this happen without seeing any possibility of it coming through, as we see God work out His plan beyond anything we can ask or imagine, as we get calls telling us that a birth mom is looking at our profile and then that she didn't choose us, as we wait and wait and wait. We ask for your prayers and support during this time. We'll ask for more later but for now please just pray with us, pray for us, pray for the birth mother of our child, I don't know her story but this may very well be the hardest thing she will ever do, pray for the child that is directly in the eye of this whirlwind, and, above all else, pray that God would be glorified and His kingdom built a little bigger here, on earth, as it is in heaven (where everyone is an adopted child!).

Adoption!

This, to be entirely honest (which is a life skill I'm working on (that and using parenthesis less often)), is probably the real reason we started this blog. Before we even got married, Christina and I talked a lot about adoption. I know that in a perfect world, in the world God had in mind when he breathed into dirt that one day, He didn't intend for adoption to be part of the plan. Adoption became necessary only after the fall but the cool thing is that it was God's solution to the fall. When everything got messed up and broken and we found ourselves lost in the universe, alone and hopeless, God decided to sit down, fill out paperwork for like two months straight, send money to a bunch of agencies that probably have real names with real words but that settle for  a bunch of capitol letters, and adopt us into His family(Okay, I guess God did it before all the paper work and those other things). And now, because stuff is still messed up, we can take part in that solution too.

So, right now at least, the thing that runs through my mind like whitewater is the nearly-invisible, all but insignificant stories that are on a collision course at this exact moment. Maybe somewhere there is a woman, maybe still a girl really, who is about to give in. Maybe the deck has been stacked and the hand she's been dealt couldn't be more unfair. Maybe she just wants someone to look at her and see her, really see her, and be drawn to something deep and real but the way she's trying to find that is killing her. Then somewhere near her is a guy. Maybe this guy has traveled a hard road to get where he is and maybe it has left him scarred and bruised. Maybe he just wants to be a man and he thinks he knows what that means but the truth is he has no clue. Sometime in the future a baby is going to be born and then be passed from one set of hands to another and maybe that transition will cause questions and struggles and confusion for that baby when he's not a baby anymore. Somewhere tonight there is another boy sitting up late punching away at keys on a keyboard desperately hoping that the words that result will produce some kind of rhythm, like the pounding of tribal drums, that would signal his coming of age into the man who is bold and certain and equipped for the challenges staring him in the face. Somewhere near this boy is a girl who is passionate and knows that the thing she was designed for, the thing that she longs for is to love a child. Just like the God who made her, the very soul of her wants to care for and nurture and love those who have nothing to offer in return. And somewhere (sound asleep in the next room) is a little boy who (much like me) has almost no idea what all is going on and how much his life is about to change. The truth is I really have almost no idea about all of the things being affected by all of this or how and what lead up to it all from so many different places, but I do know the ripples will keep spreading outward and, now, even you're rocking a little bit with the movement in the water.

Its weird to think about all of this. One of my favorite authors is always talking about how we're all telling stories with our lives, and I think that is a really good way to look at it. But, to me, it seems like  the stories are pretty boring and pointless until they start to overlap and then the depth that's created is beautiful and thats when it starts to mean something. This post was supposed to be about our adoption process. I had intended to give you all the details of where we're at with the paperwork and our next couple steps and ask you to start getting involved with us and stuff like that, but I guess I sort of got off track. I'm going to have to leave the important informational stuff up to Christina and I'll stick to the flowery, spacey, irrelevant thoughts that I like to write. And on that note, here's one more before I sign off. I think the conclusion I just came to is this: adoption, like birth or marriage or church or joining a biker gang, is God giving us overlap. It is God's way of giving our stories depth and color and beauty, but it's also, in a different way then those other things, God's way of allowing us into His heart to share in His work of redeeming the broken places and making things whole again. As scared and uncertain and unqualified as I am, I'm pretty stoked be a part of that!