Our Story An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break.--Chinese Proverb Brian and I were high school sweethearts. We started dating in 1986 when I was a junior in high school and have been together ever since. We were married 18 years ago on April 27th, 1990. We have been blessed with three beautiful children, our sons Jordan, 16, and Tannor who will be 14 in August, and our princess Haleigh, who is 11. We have always had adoption in our hearts, even before our own children were born. Brian and I have suffered through two miscarriages in the past and due to complications of carrying and delivering our three surviving babies, were told by the doctors my body could not safely handle another pregnancy. Two years after our daughter was born, I went in for an emergency hysterectomy; we were devastated. Brian got me through the grief with the promise that someday we would adopt. After that, I prayed for years to be able to adopt, but we were never financially ready. One day I said a prayer to God saying I would stop bugging him about adopting and accept that if it was meant for us to have another child he would let us know when and how, and if it was not meant to be I would feel truly blessed that I have the children he has given to us. I kept my promise and a few years later we planned to go to a Casting Crowns concert for our anniversary, but tickets were sold out. We found a person on eBay that had bought several seats for his church members, but some could not go and had to cancel, so he was selling a couple of them. We got to our concert and found out that another man that we had never heard of before would be the highlight of the concert, a man named Steven Curtis Chapman. The whole concert was about his adoption foundation called Shaohannah's Hope. He and his wife had adopted three little girls from China and started this foundation to help others with the miracle of adoption. After watching the videos, being handed adoption pamphlets and seeing families he had helped to adopt come on stage, I cried the entire concert knowing that God had brought us here to tell us it was in His will that we would adopt, and it was in His time, not ours. (God is good!) Over the next few weeks, we researched all we could on adoption and adoption agencies. We settled on an agency, and in June of 2005 we sent in our application to adopt from China. We received our approval letter on July 9, 2005, and thus our journey began. For months we filled out forms, got fingerprinted, had physicals, and also a home study. We then had everything notarized at county, state, and national levels. We thought the paperwork would never end. Finally we received an email from our agency telling us that our paperwork (our dossier) had been mailed to China on January 12, 2006. Now we were to wait for our LID date which is the date that your dossier was logged into the China Center of Adoption Affairs computer systems. We received word that our LID date was January 27, 2006!!! Now after three years of waiting for our baby girl, we will prayerfully be getting matched in a few weeks and our agency will be calling us with her information and pictures. We are so blessed to be able to experience the miracle of adoption. We believe it was God's plan for us to be the parents of this special angel from halfway around the world. We will continue to update this journal as we get more information. We hope you continue to follow our story and pray for us on our voyage to bring Savannah home.         This page hosted by