And here they are !!!

Hudson Charles and Beckham Matthew!

Born today at 12:15 pm and 12:35 pm.

Weighing 4lb 13oz and 4lb 5oz.

This is Beckham.

 And this is Beckham.

And this is Beckham too!!

The reason all of the photos are only of Beckham is that Hudson had some issues with his breathing and he is in the nicu, so birth mom didn't get pictures of him.  But I have been on the phone with his nurse and she assures me that he is doing great and should only be in a few days, just to get his strength up.

I cried as I told her I was sad that I didn't get to see pictures of him, and she said, "Did you get to see pictures of the other one?"  I told her yes and she said, "Then you've seen this one too!"  Because they are IDENTICAL!!  Wow!  I had no idea!

I am in awe!  Thank you Lord for these precious babies!  I am so thankful to be their mommy.  Thank you for the awesome woman who is sharing them with us and giving them to our family to love and treasure and raise to be Godly men!

Oh I am so filled with thankfulness and I can not wait to get there and hold them!!!  Now if only we weren't so far away!  We will be rolling toward them in a few days.  Please pray for us and that our trip to NC will be fast and safe!

I love you my sweet little baby boys!  And your sisters are so fired up!  We could probably run to NC!!

35 Weeks and still gestating!!

I am in awe of our birth mom...she is in her 35th week!! It now appears we will have September babies! Yay!!! The boys are measuring at over 5 pounds and that means bigger stronger babies and less time in the NICU which is such a blessing!

This is her picture she sent me while she was waiting to see the doctor on Monday. Such a big difference from her picture at 32 weeks. I know she is really uncomfortable, but she is doing such a great job and being so selfless about all of this. We love her for her strength and commitment to the health and safety of our precious baby boys. Please keep her and her family in your prayers.
 And speaking of Blessings... We are having such a fun time making our Blessing Blankets for Helping Hands, Saving Lives! They are so sweet and soft and I can not wait to hand them to Annalise when we go to North Carolina...soon. I will take pictures and post them.
 As I sew I am imagining them wrapped around beautiful babies while the Mommas hold them and praise Jesus for changing their hearts and filling them with love for their sweet babies!
 ...every child a Blessing, thank you Lord!

Looking for Sponsors!

As we approach the end of our adoption journey...or really the beginning with our new little men! We are in need of a fundraiser in order to afford the remaining attorneys fees and travel expenses for our family to travel to Charlotte, NC to pick up our twin boys. I have never done a fundraiser before and wanted it to make sense for our family, not just asking for donations, and not just selling something. After a LOT of prayer and a very sleepless night (I'm talking 3:30 in the morning, on my knees having some very long conversations with God kind of night!) We have an awesome fundraiser to announce!! We are asking you to Sponsor a Blessing Blanket for a baby in need! Blessing Blankets are soft and warm receiving blankets, only a little larger, handmade by me out of 100% cotton flannel in pretty and sweet colors for the girls and bright and fun colors for the boys! You can sponsor a Blessing Blanket for just $25 right there on the left side of my Blog. By clicking on there you will go to my Etsy shop where you can make your "purchase".

Your Blessing Blanket will be donated to Helping Hands, Saving Lives a ministry started by a beautiful young lady named Annalise Metzger. You can view her website here My hope is that each baby who receives one of these Blessing Blankets feels your love and God's love wrapped around them. Please feel free to share this post with your friends and family!

A Journey of Faith and Love

My family and I are starting on a new journey, one that is going to take months. Contemplating this journey has brought us together through so much prayer and discussion. This is a journey I never thought I'd actually take, one I had thought was not for me, but after all, I follow God and this is where he has led me.

We are adopting again! This time we are doing a private adoption. I will share what I can as we go, but there is a lot I will not talk about because this is not just my story, this story also belongs to others. There is a wonderful birth family and they live far away from us, so we are learning to communicate over a long distance. I am in awe of the woman who will give birth to my next children, she is so sweet and so giving. I pray for her every day, that she will always know our love and that her birth children will always know how much she loved them and wanted the best for them.

Yes...you heard me right...I said children. It's twins! And yes I am totally serious and thrilled!

We do not know if they are girls or boys yet, we have to wait another 10 weeks! To say the girls are excited and can not wait to find out is a total understatement!! Katy and Mackenzie spend many hours rearranging the furniture in different bedrooms to decide where their cribs will go. I keep telling them we have a way to go, but they want to be ready!

I continue to work my way through tax season, but occasionally I find myself wandering online over to Baby's R Us or Bye Bye Baby website! I know, I know, I really do have to wait until we know what the sex is, I have so much little girl stuff, but I have next to nothing for little boys. But it is so much fun just to look!!

On being a foster mother

I am a foster mother. Well, I don't have any foster children right now, but I am licensed and ready to have some more kiddos in my home.

I originally became a foster mother, because I wanted to adopt and after going through all of the training to adopt from the State of Kansas I found out there really aren't any young children that become available through the state. They mostly have 10 years old or older or sibling groups. That was back in 2004, when I first started the training and I had my heart set on infants or toddlers.

Why? That is a great question. Because it really didn't have anything to do with only wanting babies, though that is what a lot of people think. It also didn't have anything to do with having children that wouldn't remember any other family, which is another thing a LOT of people think.

No, it had to do with time. You see I wanted time, as much time as I could get. I thought about adopting a 10 year old, but if you do the numbers (as any good accountant would do!) I realized I would only have 8 or 9 years with this child. And then they would go off to college, just like my son did. And I would be right back where I started...empty house.

So a friend of mine, also a foster mother, suggested I become a foster mother and then I would have the chance, if the case went that way, to adopt a child that I had been parenting. Of course now I know that she was just sharing what God had put on her heart to tell me. He was pointing the way to me.

Now, 7 years later, I have 4 beautiful daughters in my home. My oldest is 12 and I am so lucky that I have many more years to parent my children. So I am glad that I made the decision to foster.

In the last few years I have been only a foster mother to my foster children, I have not had the opportunity to adopt any of the last 9 children that have been in my home. That has been harder on me than I have been ready to admit.

One minute you are loving and taking care of a child. Think about what that entails, you plan what they are going to eat for the day, plan what their nap schedule will be, plan what clothes you will need for them for the next season...and then all of a sudden you have to plan for them to leave. I am not complaining, it is something my head is fully aware of, but my heart can never seem to accept.

I know most of the children who left our home are in very good and loving hands. Not all of them, but most of them. And we have lots of pictures and memories of them and my daughters and I keep their memory alive by talking about them and openly expressing when we miss them. It makes us all feel better to share how we feel.

Now if you had asked me if being a foster mother was very important to me, well I may have told you that it wasn't as important to ME as being an adoptive mother. In fact, I think I had myself convinced that I was getting tired of being a foster mother. And then...I was told by a supervisor at the agency that held my license that I was no longer needed.

Of course, there is a much longer version of the story, one in which I did things and said things that I thought were very important at the time, and she did things and said things that she probably thought were very important at the time. But what it came down to was that they (The agency) lost a very good and experienced foster parent, and I lost a part of my life that was a lot more important to me than I had realized.

Would I change what I did now...mostly no, I think I was doing the right thing, I think I may have gone about it in a different way. I still think the supervisor was wrong in what she was doing and the way she was doing it, and she still is, and mostly that she didn't like being called into the light because she is used to working with secrets, in the dark. She calls it "privacy".

She is used to making decisions without anyone questioning her. She isn't really very powerful in her job and probably feels even less powerful in her life. And I say again, what she was doing was very wrong...keeping siblings from each other should never be part of a policy. And we all know that really isn't their policy...the policy that changes whenever need be. But most are afraid to speak up, those that work for the agency and those that work with the agency. I have never been afraid, I will always speak up when I see something is wrong. I will never just be quiet...never.

So now I am with another agency, and they are smaller and they are nice. And they do call me every once in a while, I am patient. I really do miss being a foster mother, and this time when I wondered if I would ever get to do that again has helped me see that I do want to continue.

You see my fearlessness is what makes me such a good foster mother. I am not afraid to love a child, even if I don't know how long it will be. I am not afraid to take on unknown issues with these children, I will hug them, and kiss their little tears away. I will feed them, and when they throw their good nutritious vegetables on the floor and declare in a loud voice that they want only french fries and chicken nuggets, I will quietly clean up the floor and give them organically made chicken nuggets and sweet potato fries and even pedia sure when I can not get them to eat anything at all. I am not afraid to stay up all night rocking them and singing to them because they miss their last caregiver so much and they are too little to understand why they are here.

I will continue to be a foster mother, how can I not? I do what God calls me to do. My arms are empty, but I am patient.

Adoption...

Adoption is a pretty popular word in our family. My daughters and I discuss it quite frequently.

As in, "I was adopted, right?"

And the ever popular, "Why aren't all kids adopted?"

And lately, "When are we going to adopt another baby/sister/brother?"

In fact, it is not uncommon for us to be out in public, see a cute baby and then the girls start asking me, out loud...very out loud, can we adopt that baby? Of course this is usually followed by the parents of that baby getting up and moving away from us...very quickly!

No, we can not adopt every baby we see, but sometimes I wonder why does adoption have to be so hard and sooooo expensive?! It seems to me the largest cost of adoption is the agency fees. Agencies give a lot of good information to the prospective parents, they also screen both sides to make sure everyone is on the same page, but they spend a LOT of money on advertising to find birth moms and adoptive families. But if you know a woman who wants to find a family for her child and you have a good attorney, do you still need the agency? Most would say, "No."

I have been a foster/adoptive mother for 7 years. Fostering to adopt is really a great way to add to your family, while also being useful to the greater good. It is especially great when you are younger and have lots of time, so if you have a child for a year or two and then they are eventually adopted by a relative or go to live with grandma, you don't feel like you have run out of time to repeat the process. (Yes, sometimes it takes years to find out you will NOT get to parent that child forever.)

I have also been involved with International adoption. It too can take years before you actually have a child in your home. It can also go very well and make everyone very happy, but it is pretty expensive at about $35 - $50 thousand dollars for one child! And what does that child lose? Well, since it is so expensive, often the family can only afford to adopt one child, so that child loses out on the opportunity to have siblings.

I started looking at domestic adoption, I originally stayed away from that because I thought it was going to be tremendously expensive AND I also believed that no birth mother would ever choose me. I'm not down on myself, I am just being realistic. Since I thought most women who place their babies for adoption were single and only wanting their children to be raised in a traditional two parent family, preferably with no other children.

But I have recently found out that I may be very wrong. There are women out there that would welcome a single mother. They are less interested in how many are in the family and more interested in what kind of people make up the family. In other words, are you an active family, do you go on vacations, do you have pets, is your family diverse, I think you get my drift. The trend is to look more at the character of the family, not just do you have a Mom and Dad and a White Picket Fence.

Now I am not saying all birth mothers are looking for single women like me to parent their child, but I am saying that it is not unheard of. So where am I going with this? I am starting to think that there are a LOT of families out there that would just love the chance to adopt and add to their family except for the cost! I am saying that there are a tremendous amount of families, both big and small, with one parent or two, who may not fit the traditional look of the nuclear family from the fifties...but they would make terrific families for many children out there. If only adoption was NOT so expensive!

I am saying I do not think adoption has to be so expensive!! What if there was a place...like a website...that birth mothers and adoptive mothers and fathers to be could find each other...without the agencies?! What if they could talk and meet when they were ready and find out if they had the same hopes and dreams for these children on their own?

What if there could also be social workers, and attorneys, and screening agencies, and anything else that these families needed on this website, to make the adoptions safe and secure and NOT cold and all about the paperwork and the $$$$!

Is there anything like that out there? Maybe there needs to be.