Our Story Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.--Proverbs 3:5-6 Our story probably began as young adults when we, separately, dreamed about our lives, future spouses and our children.  I knew at a very early age that I wanted to be a mother. I loved children!  I started babysitting at age 10 and babysat all the way through college.  I couldn’t imagine my life without children in it. I grew up knowing that I was going to have three children.  I was one of three siblings, and I just knew that  I was going to be the mother of three.  Milledge says he also saw himself with three children, but his dream went even further; he saw his family with two older brothers doting on a little sister.  Never, though, did it enter my mind or his that we would one day adopt.  Adoption to me was only if I couldn’t have children.  Milledge and I were married in August of 1994.  In June of 1996, we were blessed with the most beautiful baby boy we had ever seen.  Jon Milledge was a Mama’s boy from day one and still is today.  He has always been a very social, energetic, kind, athletic,  sweet and strong willed child.  Bless his heart, he looks and acts like his mother.   In 1999, we were once again blessed with a sweet, precious  baby boy.  Anderson is the apple of his daddy’s eye.  He is sweet, smart, tenderhearted, gentle, quiet, shy and funny.  He looks and acts just like his daddy.  We are very proud of our boys and the young men that they are becoming.          Ok, so our life is complete.  We have two healthy children who we adore and who keep us extremely busy.  Right? Wrong!  There was that dream we had both had as young adults that continued to nag both of us.  So, we began thinking that we weren’t getting any younger and that if this dream of three children was to come true, we must start thinking about it.   We have really good friends who adopted a little girl in 2002 from China.  Even though I love Julie dearly and thought that their adoption experience was amazing, we still never considered it for our family.  It was something that other people did.  Milledge kept saying, “If we want another baby, we’ll just have one”.  Well, we  never “just had another one”.  We now realize that this was God’s gentle hand leading us to our daughter.  Last year our friends once again adopted from China.  We followed their voyage on this very site while they were in China.  We laughed at some of their travel mishaps and cried when on “Gotcha Day,”  Shea was placed in their arms forever.  Finally, after many months of praying and wondering if we were really meant to have three children as we had both dreamed, we came to realize that God was calling us to adopt one of His precious children.   So, the decision to adopt was made after we realized that our family  could do this both financially and emotionally.   In the book of James, God commands us “to look after orphans and widows”, which doesn’t mean the same thing for all of us, but for us it means traveling to the other side of the world and bringing our baby girl home.  I think our Jon Milledge said it best when we talked to our boys about the idea of adoption.  He said, “Mama and Daddy, I know that you have always wanted another baby and you could have one, but it wouldn’t help an orphan find a family”.  Out of the mouths of babes! Isn’t it funny how God can change our hearts and minds?  Thank goodness!  Remember when I said that we only thought that we would consider adoption if we couldn’t have children?  Now, we can’t imagine our lives without the experience of adoption.   I, as a mother, feel truly blessed that God has allowed me the opportunity to have two biological children, to know and to feel  all that goes along with that wonderful experience AND now He is allowing me to experience the joy of adoption.  I don’t feel  I deserve to be that blessed.  We sent our application to our agency on January 2, 2006 and have been diligently doing paperwork ever since.  It is a somewhat daunting task at times, thinking you are never going to be finished with it all, but amazingly we are!  For the last 8 months or so, we have been engulfed in papers and new terminology like home studies, US CIS, DTC, LID, dossier and many more, but we feel we are much better for the experience even thus far.   We have already made life long friends that we would’ve never made otherwise and can’t wait to nourish those friendships as well as make many more. In the Chinese adoption world, there are several very important dates.  The first one is your DTC date, this is Dossier to China, meaning that all of our paperwork was sent and arrived safely in China.  Our DTC date is September 29, 2006.  The next important date is your LID or log in date.  This is the date that your dossier is logged into the system in China.  We are still waiting on this date; hopefully it won’t be much longer!  The next big date is your referral.  Your referral is a packet of information including pictures of the child that the Chinese officials (or God, as we believe)  have matched with your family.  The official countdown starts at your LID.  Right now from your LID to referral is 14 months.  While we are anxious to see our baby’s face, we know that this whole process is in God’s hands and that His timing is perfect.  We believe that if we receive a baby one day before His time then we didn’t receive the baby that was meant for us.  We are going to continue to stay busy with our boys and enjoy life with just the two of them for a little while longer.  Our daughter is going to be named Melinda Ruth after two very special people, and we will call her Ruthie.  Melinda is my mother’s first name, and it means “gentle one”.  Ruth was my paternal grandmothers name as well as a biblical name coming from one of our favorite Bible stories of Ruth and Naomi, and it means “friend”.  My mother and grandmother are two strong Christian  women who I strive to be like everyday.  We pray that Ruthie will not only be a gentle friend, but also a strong woman of God like her grandmother and great grandmother. Thank you so much for following our voyage to Ruthie, it means so much to know that our family and friends  will be with us!  Please pray for us as we wait, that we would be patient and continually seek God’s face during this long but amazing journey.  Also, pray for little Ruthie.  Pray that she is safe, loved, warm, healthy, happy and not hungry until we can go and bring her home.  And lastly, please pray for her birth parents. Pray that as they make the extremely hard decision to give up their precious daughter that somehow God gives them a peace about their decision and that He lets them know that she is going to be cared for and loved very, very much. Check back often...as we hope to update our happenings and any adoption news monthly on this site.   Milledge and Angie       This page hosted by