Adoption is amazing and I’m a huge advocate of it (obviously!) but it’s also messy. I think often times we romanticize it but when it comes down to it, there are just some extremely heartbreaking pieces that come along with the joy.

I didn’t know until right before Crew was born that babies adopted right at birth, even if they never spend time with their birth mom out of the womb, can go through periods of mourning. I guess I assumed that we were going to get to skip that part since we were the only parents that Crew would ever know but I was wrong. Babies connect with their birth mom’s voices, heartbeats and rhythms while in utero and so it is highly possible that they will mourn losing her. It’s so sad.

We hadn’t seen any signs of Crew mourning until yesterday. All of you mamas get it that you KNOW your baby’s different cries. There is the hungry cry, the upset cry, the needy cry and the all-out angry cry! Last night, Crew’s cry was so different. It was beyond sad and in my spirit I knew that he was experiencing a little bit of mourning. Oh you guys, it was so heartbreaking to see him go through that. All we could do was hold onto him and do our best to comfort his sweet little heart.

It was pretty amazing because after a little while, we decided to pray and as soon as Caleb finished praying, peace washed over Crew. It was immediate and the mourning was over.

I realized that we may face this at different points in Crew’s life as he tries to figure out who he is and where he belongs. We have decided that we want to be very open with him about his adoption and how his birth mom chose this for him as an act of bravery, because let’s be honest, there are other options out there that she could have chosen. We will explain how we, and so many of you prayed for years for him before he was even born and how God chose him to be ours and us to be his. We will always celebrate that we get to be a family, even though I am anticipating that at times, this could be confusing to our sweet boy and painful I’m sure.

I pray that Crew would always know that even more than he is a part of us and our family, that he is God’s. I pray that He chooses to follow Christ so that he can be adopted into His family, as His son. There is nothing better.

Can I ask for some prayer? You guys reading this are the ones who support us and have been praying for our little family and we could really use it right now. We just got an email this morning from our agency that had an unexpected bill in it that we have to pay before we can finalize the adoption process. We were under the impression that the adoption was completely paid for and that we didn’t owe any more money so this came as a shock to us and we simply don’t have the money right now. We need God to provide so we can finish this thing and make Crew officially ours! Thanks so much friends!