Sophie & Kelly's Adoption Journey

Our adoption journey began a year ago in Hawaii. When Kelly returned home from Iraq, we quickly (within 2 weeks) got all our paperwork and visits taken care of with LDS Family Services in Hawaii. You see, I have always known (since I was a young girl) that the Lord had a special child or children in mind for me and my future hubby to adopt. I was always okay with not being pregnant, I really wanted to adopt because that's what I felt the Lord wanted for our family.

Well, the years passed and Kelly really wanted to be able to make our babies, so we were able to get pregnant and we had three children. But, my body didn't seem to want to let our babies "bake" long enough--they were all born prematurely. We decided that we were probably done, so on our youngest child's first birthday, Kelly had a vasectomy. However, the night before, I had a dream that a little girl was waiting to join our family but I didn't tell Kelly in time.

For a time, my heart was saddened because I knew a special spirit was meant to join our family. However, Kelly did not have the same feelings about adoption. And so I waited for the Lord to touch his heart. More time passed and Kelly's best friend and his wife adopted a beautiful baby girl through LDSFS in Utah. They had a wonderful experience with adoption and Kelly's heart was softened. After he returned home from a 7 month deployment in Iraq, he told me he was ready to proceed with finding our baby girl. YEAH! I felt a real sense of urgency so we got right to work and got everything in within two weeks.

I thought we would adopt really fast, but we waited and waited and waited..... In that time we worked with LDS Family Services, Parent Profiles, and some other agencies in Utah, but ultimately we were led to Premier Adoption Agency in Nevada in November 2009. Just when I had lost all hope, we got the call from our agency in Nevada that we had only been working with for three months. Our baby was waiting, but she was recovering from being really sick and we were told that she might have some problems in the future because of her birthmom's prenatal drug-use. So, we prayed really hard for confirmation and called her doctors; discussing our options, but we knew from the first time we saw her pictures that she was ours! Everything just fell into place and our feelings were confirmed over and over through the Spirit that we had found Our baby, the One meant for our family.

Sophie is also breastfeeding their new baby girl through Induced Lactation. (See these two articles here and here for more info). If you want to know more about her experience send an email to indianafsa@gmail.com.