We are the A family! While I've blogged before, it has been a few years now! Our family has undergone several changes in those few years!
We started our journey in 2004 when M and I met and married! In mid-2005, after being married about 8 months, we decided we wanted to build our family. I had been reading a book (sorry, can't recall the title!) about international adoption and a family who started several orphanages around the world. One of the orphanages was in Guatemala. M is from Puerto Rico and I had these grand designs of adopting Hispanic children, preferably from Guatemala. Then we looked into the costs. We quickly realized that international adoption was waaaay out of our still newlywed budget! We decided to look into foster care! And that's when things really got exciting!
In January, 2006, we got our first placement of three children. Much to our surprise, they were Hispanic! Mexican-American to be exact. They were with us for 3.5 years as foster children before we were finally able to finalize their adoption. We also adopted 2 more Hispanic girls soon after, after fostering them for several years. We fostered 7 children from 2006-2010 and adopted 5 of them!
In 2011, we moved our 'little' family to Puerto Rico. We were there to help M's parents care for his elderly grandfather. Moving to Puerto Rico was a great experience! It wasn't some place we felt we wanted to stay for forever, but we did enjoy our time there! We were there for almost 2.5 years. After M's grandfather passed away and his parents no longer needed the full time help, we found ourselves looking to come back to the states. We didn't want to go back to the cold states of the midwest, so we settled down in central Florida in Dec 2014. We loved it there and never expected to leave!
This comes to our current step in the journey! M was working at one of the popular theme parks in the area. It was a job he really enjoyed, but he continued to feel something was missing in his life. We've both talked about, dreamed about, and prayed about going into international missions-long term. We actually thought about it before we left PR, but didn't feel a for sure 'yes' to that calling. As 2015 rolled along, we found ourselves struggling with answering the question of where did God want us to be? As much as we loved Florida, our friends, our church family, we began feeling that it was not what He had planned for us.
In the end, after much much much prayer, we decided God was telling us to GO. We also felt Him telling us that before we went into missions, we had one more stop....back to the midwest....my hometown to be exact (the LAST place I thought I'd ever go!)
Right before Thanksgiving, we packed up our big family of 7 in the blazing Florida heat and drove north...to the bitter cold midwest wind! We've been here 2 months exactly!
~S~
