Why we have chosen to adopt...... The background

I'm setting up this blog to keep all of our family & friends updated on the progress of the upcoming adoption of our first baby. For those who aren't aware of why we have chosen to have children through adoption, I want to give some background information......

Brent & I (Meagan) have always wanted to have children. We thought we’d travel around the world/US for a few years after we married, so we waited to have children. We had been married for about 3 years when we found out that we may have some difficulty getting pregnant. In 2002, my fallopian tube ruptured, and I had to have surgery to remove it. After that surgery, I stopped taking birth control. Two years later, in 2004, I had to have the other fallopian tube removed for the same reason. At that time, the doctor said that we would have to go through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in order to get pregnant.

Shortly after the second surgery, we started the IVF process. We ended up completing 3 cycles of the IVF with many disappointments and losses. Our first IVF resulted in a pregnancy for about 10 days, which I lost at Christmas in 2004. We started a second cycle right after the first, but that IVF didn’t “take”. Those cycles were a huge loss to us, so we decided to take a year “break” from IVF. We took that time for me to finish graduate school and to travel. In 2006, we completed a third round of IVF with bad news again.

After the third IVF, I also found out that I was in the early stages of ovarian failure (at 29 years old). Our doctors did not hold out much hope that we would ever be able to get pregnant, even with the help of science. Hearing news like that (with hopes of having children) was a huge blow to our family. Brent & I went through the normal stages of grief……sadness, anger, hopelessness.

But out of that grief, we realized what God had really wanted us to see all along. I had always had a ‘feeling’ that it was our destiny to adopt. God was telling us in every way possible, but before that time we hadn’t been ready to hear Him. After all the disappointments, our faith became a lot stronger, and we finally listened to what He was trying to say. We now know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God has called us to be adoptive parents!

Over the past year, we have developed a peace and desire to grow our family through adoption. We know that we will love an adopted child as much as we would love a biological child. It gives us so much joy to think about the family we will build through this process.