How our journey to adopt started

Every year on major holidays and events like (Christmas, anniversaries, birthdays, etc.) Nate and I do this thing where we say what we want this holiday to look like next year or what we cant for our lives and marriage at that time. Last Father’s Day, we went to dinner and Nate said he wanted us to be closer to growing our family by next Father’s Day. So the next day we started looking up adoption agencies and how to get this process started. The first agency we applied to denied us because they had no room on their waiting family list. We kept looking for

agencies and paths to adopt. We started classes about adoption and foster care through the state of Florida to be prepared for any scenarios that might be open to us. Right now in the state of Florida and our county in particular there are over 400 families on a waiting list for adoption through foster care! So we decided to pursue a private adoption in hopes to get connected to a biological birth mother quicker.

Even while Nate and I were dating we talked about how we both wanted to adopt children as part of our family’s story. Through this whole process we keep telling each other that this has always been the plan and it has always been God’s plan for our family and that has helped us get through closed doors and rejections. This was always part of the plan!