It all started with a dream...

It all started almost four years ago with a dream.  We started to have that feeling of missing another child. At different times our kids would say "it feels like we are missing someone." After some time, we started to realize that this might be more than just wishful thinking--maybe God was in this. On Oct 5, 2012 we were seeing a specialist for one of our children, and finally said it out loud: 'hey, what if we adopted a child that had similar condition as our child that sees a specialist." That's all it took. After that it was like God was saying "finally, you get it" and then it all came together and we began the process of trying to find her through adoption. We told our other children about what we were thinking, they were all very excited--but our one child who sees the specialist turned and looked at us with a smile larger than life and said, "you mean she will be like me?" We started working on everything and adjusting the budget and readjusting it, and then readjusting it some more. We picked up extra work whereever we could. The whole family got involved and so far we have felt very blessed and have not had to go into debt (thanks to extra work, mow jobs, and kindness of others). Month by month went by, and I don't know that our family ever offered a prayer without mentioning something about 'help us to find our little sister' (especially from our youngest--she never forgot!) We began to reach the point where we weren't sure how much longer we should keep trying to find her--we have other children and did not want to lose sight of them. I'm not sure why God sometimes has us wait until we get to the end of our ropes, but that is exactly what happened! We were trying to decide if we should let our stuff exprie and finally felt that 'no, keep going.' Then, just after we decided to keep going on March 6, 2014 just after lunch we received 'the' phone call from our adoption agency! We had a referrral and though we had recieved some referrals in the past, this was the first one that we felt really, really good about it! We shared the news with the kids over the weekend and fasted, prayed, went to the temple and everyone just knew--she was our daughter, now go get her! Finally, we could bring home the dream! 

6/6/14: Once we followed the promptings it has been miraculous to see God's hand in this process--both temporally and spiritually! Romans 8:28!