Steve & Amy – Hoping to Adopt

True Love is watching a football game that happened LAST YEAR with your husband!

I love this time of year! This week I spent the week in my classroom getting everything set up and ready. I must be somewhat crazy, but I love getting my classroom set up. I love getting all the supplies out and having my classroom organized. Maybe because it’s the only time of the year I have things organized!! I also love the excitement of the kids coming back to school. Since I teach fourth grade, I still have quite a few kids that are excited to come back..and if the kids aren’t excited…I have had several parents of my students mention how excited THEY are for the KIDS to go back!

Although I am excited for school, I’m also excited for the first day to be over! When I was younger, I had NO idea that my teachers were nervous…but sometimes I think I’m just as nervous as the kids! I have discovered in talking to other teachers that it’s common to have “Back to School Dreams.” Usually for me this involves some form of me trying to tell the students what to do while they all blatantly ignore me. So I’m always relieved when I get to school and the kids do listen to me! So far I haven’t had my dreams yet…but there’s still a few more nights!

Here we go with another year of school! I’m sure it will be a great year!

Steve and I went with my brother and my nephew to the County Fair. The boys were all excited to see the Demolition Derby. My nephew Asher, kept saying “cars mash.” Which translates to mean cars smashing. Earlier that day, I had checked online and thought about buying tickets, but I decided to just buy tickets when we got there. Unfortunately the tickets were all sold out when we got there. So we had to watch the Demolition Derby from outside the arena. Toward the end of the demolition derby, we found some “seats” on the side of a fence. It was a really good view…it just hurt to sit there for a really long time.

Our “great” seats!

Asher’s favorite part was the balloon. His favorite game with the balloon was to let it go and watch the adults frantically try to catch it! (He wouldn’t let us tie it to his hand)! He would laugh SO hard when we tried to catch it!

The goats were very excited to be fed…they even nibbled on Asher’s shoe a bit!

It was much nicer to see the bunnies than the crazy hungry goats!

In our training to run the half marathon in a couple weeks, we ran 11 miles last Saturday. Our handy dandy new phones have a cool app that tells us all about our run, including how many calories we burned based on our weight, and several other factors. We burned nearly 1300 calories. Since I don’t want to turn into nothing, I decided I needed to quickly recover those 1300 calories.

I went to the local Tasty’s Donuts and told the customer service guy that I needed 1300 calories of donuts. He chuckled, obviously amused with such an uncommon request. I asked for three double chocolate donuts with sprinkles (those are the best donuts ever in case you’re wondering). I figured that was at least 1300 calories. The best part (well, other than eating the donuts) was that he gave them to me for free. I guess he was amused with my story, or something. Anyway, I enjoyed eating every last crumb .

Why donuts instead of something healthy? Well that’s obvious. 1) Donuts are so much more tasty. 2) Have you ever tried eating 1300 calories worth of healthy food in few hours? I haven’t either. I mean seriously, how many carrots would that be?

Our next run is 12 miles. Any suggestions on what I can eat to quickly recover about 1400 calories?

Here’s a short video about us!

For today’s memory, here are a few pictures from when Steve and I were dating and engaged.

I’ve been a little busy lately, so I haven’t had a chance to post about this until now. Last weekend I took off work so we could go to the FSA Adoption Conference that Friday and Saturday. There were a ton of really good sessions for people involved in adoption in any way. There were sessions for each person involved in adoption.

We really enjoyed it, and our desire to adopt was increased. We truly feel that adoption is a blessing to many of the lives it touches. My favorite part of adoption conferences is going to the birth parent panel. I love to hear the stories of the birth parents, how they decided upon adoption, and how their lives have been since. I have so much honor and respect for these women. Here is a link to several real life stories from birth mothers. They are amazing!!

One thing we have learned since we began the adoption process, is that many people don’t agree with adoption. There are many different reasons why. Much of it probably comes from how the adoption process use to be. Adoptions use to be very closed (many agencies didn’t allow birth parents and adoptive couples to contact each other after placement), but there has since been a huge trend towards open adoption. For most situations, continuing contact in some way after placement has blessed the lives of all involved, especially the child (which is what it’s all about). It can remove a lot of the questions and curiosity the child might have because either they are able to know their birth parent(s) personally, or the adoptive couple is able to know the birth parent(s) better and therefore share more about them with the child. There are also many myths about adoption that exist. We plan to blog about some of these in the future.

This week after having attended the Families Supporting Adoption Conference (which we will post about later), we realized that we haven’t posted many of our thoughts about adoption. So in the future, we plan to post more on our thoughts about adoption.

Today for our memory, we decided to post on how we decided that adoption was the right choice for us.

After we had been trying to have a baby for a couple of years without any success, we came to a point where we had to make a decision about which path we wanted to choose to start our family. We have always felt that we were going to be able to have a family, we just weren’t sure how our children were going to come into our life. We had been thinking about it quite a bit, but we weren’t quite sure what to do. One day Amy had the thought that we should look into adoption. We were hesitant at first, and all the normal concerns went through our minds. After we had been thinking about it for awhile, we read an article about adoption from one of our church magazines, The Ensign. While reading this article, we felt strongly that adoption was how our Heavenly Father wanted us to build our family. So we started the process to get approved for adoption. Each step that we completed, led us to feel even stronger that this was the path that we wanted to take. Along the way, we’ve gained an even greater love for the process of adoption. We have seen how it can be a blessing to everyone involved. It isn’t an easy process. It requires a great sacrifice on the part of the birth mother. For this reason, we have a huge amount of love and respect for those women who make this tremendous sacrifice for their child. Although it is a sacrifice, we believe that it will be a blessing to all involved. We are now VERY excited to be a part of such an amazing journey! We feel strongly that adoption is a tender mercy of the Lord, for everyone involved in the process. We can’t wait for this miracle to happen in our family!!