I was mad, I was mad at God, I was mad at my life, I was mad at myself, I was all around mad. So I turned that madness into fitness. I started doing a couch to 5k program with a really good friend of mine and that is when fitness sort of started to take over my life instead. I am currently training for my first full marathon. I have run several (well like 30-5k’s, a few 8k’s, a few 7k’s 5-10k’s and two half-marathons but who is counting). I might have taken it a little over board but I love the way I feel. I also am a beachbody coach-more on that too! (I am contemplating starting a blog about my fitness journey). We will see. But for now, let’s focus on how we got to be a party of 3.

We “waited” 5 years.  Well, let me talk through it. We were married in 2007, started “trying” in 2008, got pregnant and lost a baby in 2009, and we finally met our son (who is now going to be 3) in 2014. So, how many years all together is that? I guess 6, but the 5 years of waiting. That was 5 years of strictly being on the “waiting list” through our adoption agency. Let me start from the beginning. Adoption is no stranger to our extended family, I may have lost track but I believe we have 11 adopted cousins in our extended family. And a majority of them have been adopted through the same agency. While I haven’t gotten approval to share with you what agency (we have a video I am going to share on here too—so it will give it away), let’s just say it was a no brainer for us to use the same agency. And so we began. We were actually pregnant when we attended our first “informational meeting” with the agency. Through our agency you have to enter into a “drawing” to be considered for the Caucasian adoption. I will share more about this topic as well later on. A few weeks after the miscarriage, we got the call that we were “drawn” for the Caucasian adoption. So, we dug in, feet first into the mountain of paperwork and endless amount of work to get our “approval.”

If you know anything about the adoption process/paperwork, it is what feels like an endless mountain of paperwork, background checks, home visits, etc.  After our initial informational meeting, we met with our social worker. Whom, I absolutely loved. You share very, very detailed information about who you are as an individual, your childhood, your relationships, your spouse, your marriage, your family, etc. with the social worker, so it is important that you trust them. The only bad thing, she left the company to stay home with the child she just gave birth to—not something I wanted to know or hear after having a miscarriage and going through the adoption process. Also, something I learned along the way, people are very insensitive and can be downright rude when they do not know your “story.” So, remember, everyone has a story. We filled out all the required papers, had a background check done, had a home study done, had 5 reference letters, employment verification, created a portfolio and who knows what else, and we were finally “approved” and the official waiting could begin. Now, they tell you on average a couple will wait at least two years start to finish for their adoption process. Well at this point we were already 6 months in, so what is another year, year and a half, right? WRONG. We had 5 more Christmas’s, 5 more birthdays, 5 more Father’s Days and Mother’s Days, without a baby. These 5 years changed me, made me a better person, probably made me a better mom, I just didn’t see it during those days, those days when I questioned God’s plan for my life. I could probably write a whole blog on the daily struggles of dealing with infertility, I again want this to focus on how we became a family of three and raising our adopted son openly with his birth family.

The road to get to this point was hard, probably one of the hardest things in my life, not the hardest, but close. It was exhausting. It was painful. It was hurtful. It was time consuming. It was depressing. It was maddening. But it was also life altering. A lot had happened to us in those 5 years. We had lost an incredibly good friend, we had switched careers, we had graduated college, we moved (3 times to be exact—see 3’s again!), and we changed, changed for the better. And then it happened…