In honor of National Adoption Month, my friend at Rich Faith Rising is sharing real life adoption stories. I was honored to share our story. Be sure to hop over to Rich Faith Rising to read inspirational adoption stories.

Oh, I was certain I was ready to be a parent. I began babysitting as soon as the neighbors allowed me to watch their children. I had worked at daycares and preschools. I had my own classroom in a public school for 6 years at that point. I was ready!

Oh, the naivety. Oh, the denial. Oh, the trust from the Father!

Shortly after getting married, my husband and I learned that it would be incredibly risky for me to get pregnant due to an ultra-rare blood disease I have called, aHUS (atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome).

I wasn’t very surprised that the doctor strongly suggested considering other methods to become parents, but it still felt very final and heartbreaking all at the same time.

I wasn’t raised to give up, so I immediately began considering different possibilities. Surrogacy, adoption, fostering? My husband wasn’t ready yet. He needed time to process that our story was not going to be the typical story of getting married, soon after getting pregnant, and then having babies.

It didn’t take long though and after about a month he was ready to talk about it again. I can remember we were driving home from our one year wedding anniversary vacation, a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We were almost home and I said, “Just think a birth mom could be pregnant right now with our baby!” Little did we know, she was!

Through divine intervention we learned that a good friend of ours had an uncle that was a well-known adoption attorney in Seattle. We were told we could have a free consultation appointment with him. We wrote down all of our questions and went to meet him. He explained the differences between independent adoption and adopting through an agency.

My husband would say I have always had too much energy and focus so the independent route sounded perfect for us because it would keep me busy! We would create our own website, business cards, posters, and profile with a photo album to get the word out to birth moms that we were ready to adopt.

We completed our home study with a social worker and on December 23rd 2004, we were all signed off and ready to fully commence our search. Everyday I tried to leave a business card someplace with our contact information. We received several calls from birth moms considering placing their unborn babies for adoption. Each time my hopes soared! One birth mom even told us we were the ones she had chosen, only to never hear from her again. I am not going to lie, this was devastating. And not proudly, I instantly began to doubt God’s plans for us.

After that fail, it was literally 2 weeks later we learned about a lovely birth mom that wanted to meet us that coming weekend. We learned that their had been drug use during the pregnancy. We also learned that the birth mom had a previous child two years prior that had many problems at birth as well as a definite birth mark. We had said to ourselves that due to my health condition, we would not be adopting a special needs child and this included any babies who were impacted by drugs and alcohol. So why were we both drawn to this unborn baby immediately? Because she was to be ours! We went to meet the birth mom and one week later, less than 5 months after completing our home study, our baby was born!

She was perfect. The nurses gave her a 10 on the Apgar test and claimed they never do that! But this one was perfect. My husband and I could not take our eyes off her. We stared at her in the hospital. We took turns staring at her on the drive home. And, then we stared at her once we got her home.

This perfect baby of ours cried a lot. There was little that consoled her except getting out of the house and moving around. She loved being in the front pack and being on the move. She absolutely would not sleep without cuddling, swaddling, and rocking for hours. She was so unlike my friend’s baby whom I had taken care of for months. My friend’s baby would sleep any where. The car, the couch, the stroller, the floor! Literally anywhere. My baby would not sleep. She could not shut out the world.

Looking back, I was in denial. She was very healthy. She was born full-term. All of her fingers, toes, and organs were fully developed. But, this inability to self-soothe and prolonged crying was not normal. Looking back, I wish we had sought help from a doctor who specialized in adoption. I wish I had been able to look at her and trust that God would help her and us and not just deny the problems.

But, God is so very faithful.

Little by little, as we’ve grown in our walk with the Lord, we’ve been able to look more humbly at our need for help. We’ve been able to accept our daughter’s imperfections as well as our own. The Lord continually shows us that we are the perfect parents for our daughter and she is the perfect child for us.

Nothing has grown my faith and trust in the Father and nothing has yielded fruit as much as parenting my children has.