Where the adoption journey begins

It started with a dream.

No seriously.

As cliche as it sounds, as embarrassed as I sometimes feel to say it it, this whole journey began with a dream.  Well, the reality of moving forward with adoption began with a dream.

Sometime in the spring of 2015, I don't remember what month exactly, maybe April, I had a dream.  Our family had adopted a 13 year old, african-american, son.  I don't remember a ton of details, just that suddenly we had this son, I was feeling very overwhelmed, but I knew that this child needed a family and that we were supposed to be that family.  And his face.  My new son.  It was so vivid and distinct that when I woke, I knew that if I were to see a picture of him, I would have recognized him.

After waking, all of my emotions centered around the dream were still so intense.  I don't know that I've ever had such a vivid dream in my life.

I told my husband about the dream and we both went "how crazy would that be?!"  I mean, our oldest is only 7.  What do we know about parenting a teenager?  And rearranging the oldest sibling order?

Yep.  Pretty crazy felt right.

We laughed it off and over the next few months we'd bring it up here and there, but never seriously and never really discussing actually doing it.

But over the summer, I kept feeling very unsettled.

My husband and I had decided that we wouldn't be having any more children.  Well, mostly it was me that decided this I suppose.  I always figured that if we were meant to have more kids, the desire to have another baby would come.  And here my youngest is, five years old, and it never came.

But as I said, I felt unsettled.  Because I kept having these weird feelings that our family wasn't complete yet.  But I didn't feel like were supposed to have another baby.  And this didn't make sense to me because that's how you get more members of your family, right?

We came back to Utah for the school year, got them settled in for the first few days of school.  But I kept feeling unsettled.  See, over the summer, I never forgot about the dream I'd had.  It stayed front and center and never went away.

So one Sunday, I prayed.  I prayed really hard to know what to do about this dream that wouldn't leave me alone.  I had considered it more and more seriously over the last few weeks, but the seriousness and all the implications that came with adopting an older son were so heavy.  So I prayed.  That Sunday was Ward Conference at our church and I prayed that I would hear SOMETHING from the speakers.  Just something to give me guidance or advice about what to do with these feelings I was going through.

We walked to church.  Sat down.  Sang the opening song.  Then our Bishop got up and began speaking and as soon as he started, I felt disappointed, because I knew it wasn't going to be anything about what I had been praying for.

But up next went one of the men from the stake.  And what he said blew me away.

He said how he was asked to talk on a completely different topic, but he felt strongly inspired that he needed to speak about something else.

"Sometimes, God speaks to us through dreams."

And he went on for about five minutes, about how God spoke to prophets in the scriptures through dreams.  How sometimes, that's the way he tells us what we are supposed to do.

My eyes welled.  My heart started racing.  I couldn't look at anyone because I knew the second I did, I would start sobbing.

I'd gotten my answer.

I told my husband about this experience a while later, after I'd had some time to process and pray some more.  And he said "where do we start?"

We've always talked about adopting someday.  Or maybe fostering older children, way down the road when our kids were older.  So adoption wasn't something that had never been thought of.  Cause it had.  But our timeframe was just pushed up, way, way ahead of what we ever expected.

It's not an easy process to begin with, but it's made all the more difficult by the fact that we live in two different states.  We are in Washington 2 1/2 months out of the year for my husband's business, and that's where our residency is, but we come to Utah for the entire school year.  And it's unlikely that we will be adopting from the state of UT or WA in my mind.

But we're praying a whole lot these days.  We're making a lot of phone calls and getting answers here and there.

And today we turned in our application to begin the home study process.

I don't know where our other son is right now.  I don't know how soon he will come into our family.  But we're doing everything we can to prepare.  And I can't wait to meet him for the first time.