Surprise!!!

Hello!

First off, let me apologize for taking so long to update the blog. We have had some life-changing events happen in the past 4 months, but we have not been able to share them until now. Drum roll, please! For those of you who don't know, we are having a baby! Yep, that's right. God decided to bless us with a New Year's Surprise! We found in January that we are having a baby around September 20th. We are so blessed and excited beyond words. We haven't been able to announce this on our blog because we waited quite a while before telling everyone our good news, and we had to let the adoption agency know.

Many of you are probably wondering (as were we) as to what will happen with our adoptions since this new development. Well, we received the official word last week that we have been withdrawn from the Ethiopian program. As soon as we found out we were expecting, we knew we had to reveal the good news to the adoption agency, but we also knew that there was a strong possibility that they would ask us to withdraw from Ethiopia. We gave them the news a few weeks ago and finally heard back. The mandatory withdrawal is for 2 reasons: (1) The Ethiopian government requires at least 2 years between a birth and an adoption. (2) Children’s Hope International requires at least 1 year between a birth and an adoption. Because of the timeframe in which we would more than likely receive the Ethiopian children this year, we would be outside the parameters for both. The good news is that they are allowing us to remain in the China program and continue to wait. Our projection is that it will still be 4+ years before we are able to complete that adoption, so we will be beyond the 1 year agency timeframe. This is a bittersweet time for us, as we are so excited about our new baby, but we also were looking forward to adopting from Ethiopia. We know that this is the way it was meant to be, and God has a plan for everything and everyone. We also trust that there are the perfect parents out there for those kiddos.

The pregnancy is going really well so far. God is so good! We are 18 weeks along at this point and hope to find out the gender some time in May. Stay tuned for that announcement! I am just beginning to show, and I have posted a picture from Easter for those interested in seeing my "baby bump." Thanks to everyone for all of your thoughts and prayers over the years. We appreciate them more than you know and are blessed to have each and every one of you in our lives. Have a fantastic week!