Keep dreaming. It’s what brings you life. Even when your dreams take detours; keep seeking God’s direction and peace in dreaming and go after it!

Team Carter dreams of adopting one day. Adoption is something that has been on our hearts since before we were married. We wanted (and still want) lots of kids and our hope is that they are a combination of biological and adopted children to complete our family.

We are not pursuing this because we are seeking affirmation from people. Please save your “bless your heart” comments.  It’s not about us rescuing a child, as if he or she is a puppy from the pound. These are our future children we are talking about. We really believe that our children are out there and when the timing is right, they will join our family forever. To us, they are worth fighting for–to keep dreaming for.

Since October 2016, I had been getting lots of words in my time alone with God to research adoption. Key word: “research.” Not necessarily, “do it.” That’s really hard, when you believe that you are called to do something long-term, but have to take baby-steps, when your heart wants to sprint that marathon.  I started researching adoptions, both domestic and international. Something even came up that we never expected to be interested in: foster care.

We know there are so many “what ifs.” There are so many misconceptions surrounding foster care and adopting children. But the more we learned, the more we wanted to pursue it. We have friends who are currently fostering long-term and short-term placements. We have friends who have recently adopted (both internationally and in the States). We have friends who are in the grueling process of waiting to adopt their children. And we champion them all! We are watching friends battling a broken system. We are watching families, who pour out so much love and time, and they are rejected. We hear that there is an overwhelming need. We think, “What can we do to help?” “Why us?” Why not us.

The program we were applying for stated, “We are not about finding a child for every home, we are finding forever families for children.” The goal for fostering in our state is always reunification with the birth family if possible. Meaning, your intentions of hoping to adopt children in foster care may, or may not happen. It seemed, as we learned more about our state standards that adopting, or accepting a long-term foster care placement (to hopefully adopt them in the future), seemed just as miraculous if we were to become licensed and approved to be matched with a child, or children — just as miraculous as it would to become pregnant with more biological children!

For awhile, it seemed we were making progress. We attended an informational meeting on adopting and fostering in the Spring. In the following month, I had three confirmations of friends or situations that arose that pointed me to the exact same program that we had been looking into. We were communicating with a case worker and were filling out two mountains of paperwork. We had physicals done, background checks and fingerprinting and even had the support from our immediate families. The light was green.

And then, it turned red.

Over the next few months, it became harder and harder. We wondered how much of it was hard, just because people admit that it is hard, or if it was truly a “closed door.” The final test was if we were going to be able to proceed because of our volunteer work in foreign countries. *If this helps anyone, if you were on a “tourist visa” and never had an identification number assigned to you (ie: a work visa), proving that they can track your “outstanding good citizen records”, then DON’T say you ever “lived” in that country. As a tourist, you are technically “passing through” and you don’t need to claim residency there.* As volunteers, we never “existed” in any sort of formal way with foreign governments. We even got our supervisor to write an email saying that we were of good standing and didn’t have any trouble while abroad. It wasn’t good enough. I was so anxious about the whole thing, but it was totally out of our control. Both governments were not going to write anything about two tourists, on a government letterhead, translate it into English, and mail it back to the US; short of us returning abroad to do it in person (if that).

We have learned so much in this process. We learned more about our family, what we can handle right now and what we can’t. David and I had to communicate more than before about what situations we would be comfortable with. I think we were even trying to compromise in ways to make us fit into a category to be accepted. We discovered more about David’s health, so we have changed the way our family eats. We have been doing no dairy and more vegetarian meals. We grieved for awhile that things became out of our control and that we did not wish to continue until we were sure we were qualified to do so. We talked. We prayed. We communicated to close friends and family.

And then came our answer: we found out we are pregnant with #3!

With a pregnancy, if you are in the process of fostering or adopting, we automatically go on a “wait list” for a year and nine months in order for you to bond with your biological baby before you continue with the program.

Wow! We always said we wanted more children, no matter how they came to us, and for right now, that means another child biologically! We didn’t have long to grieve, because this child has brought so much joy and love into our lives already! Praise God!

So we will have to wait and see what the future holds with our adoption dream, but for now we are going to enjoy the adventure we have been given!