Last year was the year of Frozen fun for us seemed like! We have all been pretty obsessed with Frozen!
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This passed year has been quite the year for us. We bought a business and added a 4 yr old to our lives! We had no idea this is the life that God had in store for us, and we have no idea what 2014 will bring, but we are so excited to find out! We have legal guardianship of our sweet little Amber and life has been busy but also amazing! Our journey and search is not over though, we are still hoping to give Amber a sibling. She desperately wants to be a big sister and we would love to give that to her in 2014! Our minds have been opened in ways we never thought possible and we have just been taking life as it comes one day at a time. We have learned so much this passed year and we know we still have much more to learn. The holidays this year have new meaning to us and we have loved the opportunity to create so many wonderful new memories and begin new family traditions. This has definitely been a stressful crazy year for us, but it has brought us a joy that we could never have imagined. We are so blessed and grateful for all we have been given. This has been the year of new beginnings for us and we have so much to be thankful for. We are a new little family looking forward to hopefully a new addition next year! Well for over 3 months now our lives have been completely turned upside down with having a cute and wild little 4 yr old girl living with us. She calls us mommy and daddy, and we have grown to love her very much. She has given new meaning to our lives and given us so much more than we could have ever imagined. She is quite a handful; full of so much energy and is constantly on the move! She is feisty, sassy, willful, and very independent; but she is just a baby who needs constant love and attention. We have learned so much about ourselves and about life. God has truly been teaching us so much and opening our hearts and minds in ways we never thought possible. We have found ourselves constantly on the move and almost have to schedule time to just relax. Between our business, my job, our church commitments, family, and now our little precious angel, life has become just a rush and we are almost not able to enjoy it! We are learning how to balance everything and not take for granted the precious moments that pass us by. Our situation right now does not have a sense of permanence and we have not been able to fully breathe easy just yet. There is the looming fear that she will be gone and we will be back where we started. We have a court date coming up and we are hoping for good news to share with everyone. We just want to feel more like this is our real life and it is not just a surreal temporary dream. Please pray for us! Our family is not complete either, we would still love to adopt a baby! Every night the 3 of us pray for a baby brother and a baby sister, she insists we say "and." We are hoping and praying that our new family is permanent, but if it isnt we will continue to trust that this is all part of His plan and that He is more in store for us. Thank you for your patience, this is a long road and we appreciate all the continued love, prayers, and support!
It has been a while since I have posted, we have had a lot going on in our lives lately! We have recently moved into a bigger apartment! We can now better accommodate whatever new children hopefully come into our lives. We live in a great apartment complex that even has a preschool here onsite! This complex is very family friendly with playgrounds and a small wading pool for kids. We have also become business owners! Jeremy has been the Director at My Gym Yorba Linda for several years and the opportunity presented itself to become the owner and we were able to purchase it! Jeremy absolutely loves his job and is very passionate about this business that promotes children's fitness. We hope eventually I will be able to either quit or go part time at Disney and help Jeremy at the gym or stay home with our kids. We also hope that some day we can open another My Gym! Things are coming along for us and we are getting more and more prepared to become parents. Our children will get to go to My Gym and Disneyland for free, what more could they want?! We believe that the timing just hasn't been right before now and that we are getting closer and closer to fulfilling the dream of being parents. It is all in God's hands and we are just trusting in His plan and timing. We know our children are out there and we hope to be a family soon! We do have a possibility going on right now that we are really hoping will work out. We have had so many not work out, so it is difficult to try to not continuously get our hopes up. We have had some great new beginnings this month and we hope for more to come! Thank you for all the support and prayers. Please check out our My Gym and LIKE our fb page! Thank you! https://www.facebook.com/mygymyorbalinda http://mygym.com/yorbalinda We would like an open adoption and we want people to know what that means in hopes that more couples looking into adoption will also want an open adoption. Open adoption can mean different things to different people, so we want to clarify what it means to us, so any potential birthmom will know exactly what we are hoping for and expecting. My (Janine) mom was adopted when she was an infant, and she does not know who her birth family is at all. She has never tried to look, and she will tell you she is not curious. Her adoption was completely closed. She grew up always knowing she was adopted, there was never a moment when she had to be told, she just grew up always knowing. She knew she was wanted by my grandparents and she knows she is loved by them, but there will always be that lingering feeling that she wasn't wanted or loved by her birthparents. She will never understand why she was "given up." To her she was abandoned. Many adopted children, especially children from a closed adoption will feel this way, it does not matter how much the adopted parents love them and how wonderful they are, they will still feel that they were unwanted and abandoned by their birthparents. Jeremy and I hope that our children do not have to experience any of these feelings. We do not want our children to wonder why they look different from us, or who it is that they look like; we don't want our children to ever feel unwanted or unloved, or that were "given up." We want our children to grow up knowing exactly why they were adopted, and we want them to know who they look like and that they are loved by their birthparents. If they grow up knowing this, then they should never experience any of those feelings that so many adopted children feel. We have to do what is best for the children, and put aside any feelings of selfishness. We have embraced these ideas and we are now an advocate for them. We understand that an open adoption is not always a possibility. We know that there are many circumstances in which our children will not be able to know who their birthparents are. We will still be as open and honest with them as we can, and do whatever we can to help our children if they begin to experience any feelings of abandonment or wonder regarding who they are and why they were adopted. We are open to any type of adoption and we know that we will be led to the children we are meant to parent! Our enormous hope is that we find a birthmother that will become part of our family. We hope to find someone that we can fall in love with and that we will feel comfortable with sharing all the wonderful moments of our children. We want to make a lifelong commitment to her that we will forever call her family and our child will forever know her as their birthmom. We envision being connected to her as we are to any of our extended family members, through phone calls, texting, facebook, email, skype, visits, holidays, birthday parties, etc. These are our hopes and dreams of a new type of family. We believe this is the healthiest thing for adopted children and also for birthmothers. We would also love for the birthfather to be known and involved. We feel that this type of relationship may take some adjusting on all parties, and it may take some time to get used to. These are our hopes and thoughts on the matter and we hope it helps people understand how important open adoption is to us and hopefully inspire anyone thinking about adoption to change some of their original feelings about it. We are sincere in our beliefs about open adoption, and we are continuing to trust in God to lead us to the right birthmother who would be a great addition to our family! Well 2012 is coming to an end and so we begin 2013! We had a good year with some good and some not so good moments. 2012 will always be the year that our adoption journey first began with finding out that we may never be able to have children naturally. It was difficult news, but it led us to this point and we could not be more sure with our decision. Adoption was never a last resort for us, we could have gone through with infertility treatments, but we decided that was not for us. We know that we are meant to adopt. We were really hoping for a baby for Christmas, but we are now confident that the timing was not right and 2013 will be our year! This will be a big year for us with lots of changes; we are anticipating a lot of stress! We are just going to trust in God to get us through it all. We had a wonderful Christmas with family! Christmas Eve we went to our church for the candlelight service and it snowed inside our church and then out in on the patio, it was a lovely So Cal Christmas! Christmas Day we spent with Jeremy's family all day playing games, opening presents and eating a lot of yummy food! We are hoping that next year we will have the addition of a little one to brighten the holidays! Well until next year!! Happy New Year!! Well there are stirrings happening and it is so difficult not to get our hopes up! Ever since we started this journey back in July we have faced a couple different possibilities. We have been trying to be very careful to not get our hopes up and we just keep trusting that whatever is supposed to happen will happen. We were hoping for a little one for Christmas, and that would have been the best Christmas present that we could have ever hoped for, but looks like that is not going to happen. We have already had a couple of the possibilities not work out, and that is okay, we were not completely let down because we have not been getting our hopes up too high. Well a couple of new possibilities have presented themselves, and once again we have to guard our hearts and hope that they are legitimate. We have to watch out for scams, and be very careful. There are so many risks involved, and we never know which way we should go or what exactly is the right thing to say or do. We just have to continue to keep the faith and keep hoping that God will lead us to the right birthmother or to the right child. Our hearts are ready, open, and willing to take in not only a child, but a new member of the family. To some it may seem unconventional, but we believe there is a birthmother out there who needs us just as much as her little miracle inside her. We are ready to be there for her and for her to become part of our family. Once again there are so many risks that have to be taken, and we have to trust complete strangers who may live across the country! Never before have we had to have so much trust in the Lord for guidance. Our lives and future are completely in His hands. Please continue to pray for us that we will be led in the right direction and that all the worries and questions we have will be answered and put to rest. We feel the year 2013 is going to be a very big year for us with a lot of changes! It is very exciting and very scary, but we will continue to have faith and hope! We are fortunate enough to have wonderful family and friends who have either been giving us or selling us baby stuff for super cheap! We have strollers, carseats, a rocker, and pack n play's. It is all in storage now, but is easily accessible if we need any of it last minute! We are still waiting patiently and hoping to find our baby soon. It is kind of scary to think that at any moment we could possibly get a phone call that a birthmom has chosen us and we have to leave right now to go and get the baby. Most people have 9 months to prepare for a baby, and we will have no time to prepare! Will we be ready and know what to do? It is crazy to think that in a moment notice our entire lives will be completely different! Our entire universe will be turned upside down. It is so exciting and scary all at the same time. We are trying to be as ready as we can be, and also be patient not get our hopes up too high when a small possibility presents itself. The year is almost over and we are hoping that 2013 is the year that we find our baby and start our family! Thank you so much for all the help, support, and prayers! We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season! We had a great Thanksgiving weekend spending time together and with family! We both worked together in the kitchen to prepare our side dishes we contributed and we had Thanksgiving lunch at Jeremy's parents house. There were a total of 18 of us! After we ate ourselves into a colma we all hung out and spent time together. Jeremy had family here from Tennessee, so it was nice to spend some time with them! In the evening we did a little black Friday shopping and got a great start to our Christmas shopping! Friday morning we did a little more shopping and then met up with Jeremy's family again for lunch with some more friends. All in all is was a nice weekend spending time together! |
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We are Janine and Jeremy and we want to adopt a baby! This blog is for documenting some of our thoughts and experiences along the way! Archives
March 2015
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