THRILLED TO BE ANNOUNCING......

We are adopting a brand new baby boy in January! We are sooooo excited! We feel so blessed and so lucky to have met our amazing Birth Mother, Mariel. She is so awesome. We just clicked from the moment we started communicating. She has such a great sense of humor, she's smart, beautiful, fun, entertaining, confident, talented and has so much maturity and faith. It has been such a pleasure to get to know her and spend time with her. We love her so much and are so honored that she has chosen us to be the parents of her much loved baby boy.

We don't know exactly how to sum it all up because there's so much to tell and I know I won't do it justice. We decided a while ago that we weren't going to try to keep everyone updated on everything all the time because it was just too emotional. So we kinda sorta dropped off the map in case you didn't notice :) We've been so busy trying to find our baby. We didn't hear anything from anyone interested for the first almost two years we were in the adoption pool. Then, all of a sudden, the flood gates opened! Since May, we have been contacted by 12 different birth parents. At one point, we were communicating seriously with four birth mothers. FOUR. We met them all face to face within a period of 2 weeks. Needless to say we were a bit overwhelmed, but we tried to have faith and believe that Heavenly Father would guide us to the right person and the right baby, and we hoped that no one would get hurt. One by one the birth mothers we met started making their final decisions, and we weren't it. But we felt OK about it because we knew something would work out.

Enter Mariel. She is 17. She emailed us pretty early on in her pregnancy. She was very open and honest about where she was in her process, which was awesome and super helpful, but she really hadn't decided what she was going to do. She was keeping all her options open: marriage, adoption, etc. She told us that her mom found our profile and showed it to her (Thank You LeaAnn!). Mariel looked it over and decided to email us to get to know us better. Yay! Our common loves were Brian Regan and Coldplay :) so funny. Anyway, we thought Mariel would be long gone in a short while, afterall, we were the first people she contacted and she still had so long to go and so many choices to make. She was still so honest too about the fact that she was keeping all her options open. So about a week went by before I had responded to this one email from her, which was longer than I meant to take, and she emailed us again saying that she had looked at lots of other profiles but she just didn't like anyone else as much as she liked us! Bless her. So from that day forward (maybe 5-6 weeks ago) we have emailed back and forth pretty much every/every-other day. We became such great friends. I love emailed back and forth with her, she's so hilarious. During the course of our communications, we could see that she was really working things out in her mind and it looked like she was leaning towards adoption. We decided to meet! The first time Kirk and I met her and her mother we spent about four hours with them visiting and going out to lunch! Our conversation was so natural and fun. Then the next week Mariel and I went for a little girl's date and got pedicures and had dinner. We had a great time. She is very down to earth and I think we're just on the same page, which has been so cool.

So the next week, on Wednesday, September 23, Mariel and her parents took Kirk and I out to dinner at Carrabba's (my fave). We walked into the little room where they were seated waiting for us and there was this huge gift basket full of little boy clothes, toys, her favorite books from her childhood, a blanket, etc. It was SO SWEET! She gave us the sweetest card. She told us that she could not give her baby to anyone but us, which just absolutely humbled and amazed us. It was such a special experience sitting there with her while she announced that she was giving us the best gift we could ever receive. A baby. A family! It was so unbelievable. We love her so much and are so excited to meet our little buddy when he is born in January (Jan 18-22, somewhere in there).

This is Kirk and me with Mariel. She's TALL and so naturally beautiful.

This is the gift basket that Mariel and her mom put together for us. Is it not so amazing? I seriously pick up those onesies from time to time and just hold them, visualizing our sweet boy in them and imagining how much we will love him.

We continue to keep in touch with Mariel. She lives very close to us actually, and we will have an open adoption with her. We are trying hard to get ready, emotionally, spiritually and especially physically! Kirk is downstairs hammering away trying to finish our rooms so that we'll have a nice place for him to live. We are grateful for this time to get ready and know it will go fast. We have decided that it doesn't really matter, we will take him whether we're ready or not!! :)

Thank you for all of your love and support. We have been sustained by it during this trial, which seems so strange to call a trial now, and have felt your prayers. We love you and are SO excited to share this news with you!!

Heather & Kirk