One week from today...




One week from today, I will be a mommy all over again...officially...it's a boy....and...a girl!LOL! I simply cannot wrap my mind around it...my reflexive self is starting to do the "something bad is going to happen because I could not possibly be about to experience something so amazing!"  I know that is not true...because I have spent the last two years (minimum) experiencing incredible things...watching miracles unfold before my eyes...the culmination of SO many dreams...dreams I never really dared hope would come true..."winning the lottery" type dreams...we have talked of these dreams for years...honestly, the first time we spoke of adoption we had just gotten married and were feeling sad that having children together wasn't ever going to be a possibility(or so we thought!)  But, about 6 years ago, we started to dream some about adoption (ok, we also dreamed about surrogacy...so, that will tell you just how far fetched we thought any of it was!)  the most amazing part? This miracle...adoption...it has lead me to a place where I am genuinely SO thrilled that I could not have any more children myself...we would have missed out on SO much if we had just been allowed to experience the every day miracle of pregnancy and birth of our own child...in fact, I really doubt we would have appreciated it nearly as much as we should have...


But, two years ago is when things really started to heat up...the longing for a child of our own had gotten stronger and stronger...I would no sooner talk myself out of dreaming....let it go and move on again, than the desire would return with new force...I cried...I dreamed...I let go...and then I did it all over again. It never occurred to me that that God had planted that seed...that dream, for a purpose...and He was beginning to leave us breadcrumbs...


THE moment happened in St. John the Baptist Cathedral, in Spokane Washington...yup...my hubby and I were celebrating our 7th wedding anniversary...it was September 25th...a sandwich day...the next day, September 26th was our seventh wedding anniversary...but, what no one else knew(because I had not pointed it out) was that the day before...the 24th..was the 15th anniversary of the loss of my dream of a daughter...I was in midterm pregnancy when we found out that our childs heart was no longer beating...the baby inside of me had died...I was utterly devastated...but, on this day...God reminded me that He knew...He remembered...this is the post I shared that Monday when we got back to town...

It was one of those moments...I have not had many moments exactly like this one...but, it was one of those moments when you know He's here...He's in this place, holding your hand...and He touches your face and says “Little one, I love you very much”...

We were in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Spokane, Washington...it was breathtaking! My lovely niece Trista and I had been here before but we were restricted to photos of the outside of the cathedral...tours ran from 11-2pm each day...it was 3:00...for two passionate photographers who are just as passionate about gorgeous buildings, places of God and history and holiness, this had been a tough break...today was different...today I arrived at 11:20 am...my view into this place robbed me of breath...the next hour was spent in what I have come to call “photo seizure”. The light was incredible...the stained glass was so beautiful...the shadows were captivating...at the end of our visit, I was waiting for an opportunity to take a particular shot of the cathedral from one end, looking towards the pipes of the organ in the back of the cathedral...there were several people milling around...being me, I wanted a shot with no one in it...a silent moment to remember Whom this place was built for...after waiting for several minutes, I decided to let this shot go and we packed up to leave...after we left the building, I turned to photograph a door that had caught my eye on the way in and saw everyone leaving! All of them were walking out the door to their cars across the street...that is when it happened...I had no idea what God was doing or that He was doing anything at all...
I re entered the building and made my way to the front to capture the shot that I had been longing for...a kind gentleman whom we had spoken with upon entering the first time moved quietly across the frame of the photo...he did not see me there...I continued to frame the shot...completely unprepared...it is amazing what music will do to a person...as I stood there, alone, soaking in the powerful sense of history and God's presence...this man, thinking he was alone, sat down at the grand piano and began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata........I nearly dropped to the floor right where I stood...it was all I could do to back up several feet and drop to the steps at the base of the alter and put my face in my hands...I held my breath for several moments...the music filled the room....the room filled my eyes...the light, the color...the shadow...and the knowledge that no one else would have known...Only God knew what yesterday was...or what that song meant to me...fifteen years ago September 24th...that was the day that I lost our baby girl Mikaela Lohelani...that was the day they told me that her heart had stopped beating and she was no more...when I first learned I was expecting, I purchased a cd of the song...all through my pregnancy with her I had listened to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata dreaming of sharing the music with my daughter...I played it wondering, at what point she would hear the sound...wondering if she would share the same passion for music that I held inside...wondering, if like me, she would press her ear to the stereo speaker at 3 years old because she could not get close enough to the music...wanted to be inside of it...and here I was...no one knew, I had not pointed it out to anyone...I just quietly acknowledged it and let it go...fifteen years is a long time...but, today, on the steps of the alter...listening to a live God ordained performance of the song of my heart for my daughter...fifteen years disappeared in a moment...but, now, it was mixed with a knowing...and a sense of being known...I am not sure I can accurately describe what that moment was like...sitting in this place...with this Person...knowing that He had been thinking of me...knowing that He knew I would be here, listening to this song...alone, except for the musician...and my Abba...what I heard today was that eternity is waiting...she is holding her breath...and one day when all of Creation is redeemed in an instant...we will see Him...I felt as if God Himself had reached down and stroked my face...wiped away the tears and sat with me on the steps of the alter and listened to the song...that song...all I could say was “Thank You”...

That moment stayed with me for a very long time...and try as I might to let go of the dream of adoption, it kept getting bigger!! I told my hubby what I felt God was saying...his response? "I don't want it!"  That was it...he did not want to pursue the dream...he did not want to believe God was asking us to pursue the dream. Like me, he had no idea of the miracles that lay ahead of us.  We were such small thinkers...such small dreamers. Really...microscopic dreamers. 

I prayed, I dreamed, I cried...I dreamed some more, I prayed some more...by Christmas time, something inside of me just knew...I knew the next year at Christmas we would have a little girl. I thought she was in China somewhere waiting for us...I thought I knew it was a girl...I ached...I cried, I prayed...by the first of the year...my hubby had started to soften to the idea...(it worked so much better when I shut my mouth and prayed instead of trying to convince him myself!!) In January, we began to investigate the idea of adoption by going to an agency in our town...my hubby thought he had started to hear God speaking of foster care...I was terrified of that idea. I couldn't imagine surviving the loss of a child who went back home, or to relatives, etc. (honestly, still can't!)  But, we filled out paperwork(because you have to have a foster license through the state as part of the adoption home study, no matter what you do!  The dream began to seem like more of a reality...began to take shape. We made plans to add an egress window in the basement for the child who would sleep there...

In February, we attended PRIDE training, at the end of that training, we were introduced to a family who had adopted their two little ones from foster care...the boy had come to them at 10 months old...and his little sister less than a year later...I had been trying to talk myself out of the certainty that I had that we were on the right track and going to have a child.  What I did not know was that , again, God was thinking SO much bigger...because through those people...He introduced us to the adoptive mother of two little boys...who knew of another child to be born...that child proved to be a boy(we found out by ultrasound!)...it was the first time we ever considered the idea of a son...we had been so set on a daughter, all of our paperwork said female child, 0-2 years old. We were told that was not going to happen...that we would wait years for a daughter with those kind of guidelines in place.  But, knowing about this boy caused us to start considering having two children so that there would be no "only" child in our home. God began to drop breadcrumbs for us...left and right...the crib we bought (in spite of being told we would never get an infant) came from a family with TWINS...from foster care...boy/girl twins! The rocking chair we bought was from a couple who had two kids from foster care...when we started to really catch on that it would be two, I joked that God was gonna have to come up with another crib quickly! Well...about an hour later I got a text from my sister(did I mention we were on her side of the mountains for a random visit to the Seattle area...we don't do that...but, we did...) she had a friend, not 10 minutes away from us who had a crib and wondered if we might need another one? !!!!! Needless to say...we started to get a little nervous...it looked like there really would be *two*!!! 


Here we are, nearly two years later...and there are, in fact, two...and we could not be any more thrilled than we are! We have survived the first year of life with what amounts to "functional" twins(my name for them...I don't like some of the names out there!) We do not treat them like twins...but, day to day life, looks really similar to a home with twin toddlers!


The hope is that I will actually keep up with this blog...and maybe once in awhile, flashback to some piece of the incredible story of Love and Grace, Mercy and Favor that we have lived in the last two years! Thanks so much for reading!