It's Snowing Down Blessings
Happy 2024! It's hard to believe a new year is already starting. I don't usually make New Year's resolutions because ... well, why mess with perfection?
But there are some things I want to be more intentional about this year. One of those is talking about the blessing that is adoption. I was adopted at birth - at 3 weeks of age, to be exact. What a blessing my adoption has been in my life, my family's life and the life of my birth mother.
Becky, my birth mother, was only 17 when she found out she was pregnant and had me. At that time my parents, Boots and Sherry Blackwell, were in the midst of the adoption process after almost 10 years of trying unsuccessfully to have a baby of their own. It was a Friday afternoon when mom picked up the phone to hear that a baby girl had been born and would be their's. By all accounts mom dropped the phone and ran screaming to the back yard to get dad. He thought someone had died!!
That weekend they rushed around getting everything ready for the new baby with help from their family, friends and church. When Monday came around they made the hour-long drive down to New Orleans to pick me up. And the rest, as they say, is history...
But history has a way of repeating itself. No one imagined, least of all me, that years later I would struggle with infertility. Joshua and I tried for almost 10 years, just as my parents had done, to have a baby. We tried fertility treatments, inseminations and charting - which, take it from me, if you are at all OCD charting will take over your life!
We started looking into adoption - something we had always been interested in given the fact that I was adopted. It was while we were exploring the different adoption scenarios that we heard about embryo adoption. We ended up using Embryo Adoption Services of Cedar Park.
It's handled just like a regular adoption in that we were matched with a biological family, we had a home study and a lot of background checks. The difference is that we adopted 5-day old frozen embryos. Once everything was finalized our frozen embryos were shipped to our doctor's office. That's right, FedEx delivered my baby.
Our embryo(s) were thawed and 2 of them were placed inside me. And from those 2 frozen embryos our little snowflake baby, Lorelai, was born. What a blessing she is!
We spent Thanksgiving with my mother and my sister and her family last year. My sister, Jodi, commented on how Lorelai was always singing and humming. Then she noticed that I was always humming as well.
"Jennifer! That's where Lorelai gets it!" she said.
I thought about it and realized that my humming habit started when I was pregnant with Lorelai. She is my long hoped-for, prayed-for gift. She has put a song in my heart.
Adoption has blessed my life in ways that I'm probably not even aware of. If you are struggling with infertility I encourage you to pray about adoption. Maybe that's the way God is going to answer your prayers and make your baby dreams come true.