How we came to this....

My husband (hereby referred to as The Jester from now on) and I met in AP English our senior year of high school.  We fell in love within a month, dated throughout college, and married our senior year of college.  We are 100% made for one another and that is obvious in our life goals, faith, values, terrible senses of humor, and most other facets of our personalities.  While in college, we talked about adoption being something we both desired and felt called to do.  In the Bible, Christians are directed to care for the widows and orphans of the world.  Fast forward many years to about a year and a half ago.  The Jester and I began "the discussion" of when, how many, how's this gonna go in relation to the whole kid thing.  We toyed with the idea of trying for our own biological children, but decided that many people do not feel the call to adoption and that since we did, why not go that route first or maybe only?

Being the crazy planning and research obsessed person that I am, I immediately went into research mode about every form and process of adoption in order to map out our journey as best I could.  We attended a Riverside County orientation, which scared the socks off of The Jester and I.  I am pretty sure it was intended to scare away people who only view foster care as a business, but going through the County just didn't seem like the right fit for us.  Researching private adoptions came up with total sticker shock as we discovered it cost between $20,000-50,000 to adopt privately or internationally.  Oh heck no!!!  A few months ago, we attended a foster-adopt support group at our wonderful church where we discovered that there are foster family agencies, which are non-profit organizations who can certify you to become eligible to foster-adopt.  We chose Kinship Center, based out of Orange County and Redlands, to be our agency.  Since then, we have started the process, which will soon follow in another post.  

Our hope for this blog is that it will be a way for us to memorialize our journey through the foster-adopt  process, provide encouragement to those who think they can't do it, and have as much faith through the process as possible.  If you are willing, please pray for us throughout our journey!

Our Prayers:

- Let us keep our eyes prayerfully on the will He has for our family, especially in regards to the specific needs of the children we may be matched with.

- Keep our hearts guarded against spiritual attack, especially fear.