With a little help from my friends...

Did y'all watch The Wonder Years? It is to this day my most favorite show, and the theme song, With a little help from my friends, is one of my favorite songs. So when I was thinking about writing about how much my friends help me through this adoption process I had to include this great song for y'all to listen to.

When you decide to adopt they give you a lot!! of reading material to go through, to help prepare you for what to expect. I really appreciated the reading material (although I could have handled less articles on each individual topic) as it helped me to think through many aspects of International and inter-racial adoption that I hadn't considered. But let me tell you it is possible for the outcome to be different than what they try and tell you in all those articles, meaning you just might have wonderful people in your life who will make everything okay, not difficult.

Maybe I live in Utopia I don't know, but I have only had the most wonderful responses when people find out about our adoption. My friends, my church, and my community have absolutely blown me away. With all the steps along the way I've asked my circle of friends and family to pray and they have! I have had people tell me what they're praying for me and it makes me cry because it's the most wonderful perfect prayer that God laid on their heart and I would never have asked Him for that, even though it's exactly what I need. For example one of my closest friends told me that she was praying that God would sprinkle our scent onto Jack so that he would know our smell and be comfortable with us when we meet him.

People are genuinely interested about how the adoption is going, I get asked questions about it several times a day, and they listen with interest to what is going on. They are invested in this process with me and they go through the ups and downs with me. When we found out who are son was I had a friend come out to me who had learned about it on our blog and hug me with such excitement telling me how she just cried when she found out she was so happy for us. I can't talk to a family member without them wanting to know, when will Jack be home and hearing we've got to get him home soon.

People think of him as my son. This is the ultimate for me. In this training material, you read about people having friends or family who will not accept their child who was adopted and treating them like an outsider, even introducing their family as this is their daughter Kylynn and this is their adopted son, Jack...I would lose my mind, I would be so angry! I never want Jack to be treated like anything other than what he is, my son, regardless of how he joined our family. I have had no one make me feel like they don't accept Jack as my son, they have given me hand me downs, planned a shower for me, and talked about how great it is that he will be the same age as their son.

People want to help. A dear christian man who is mentoring my husband has been a god send on going through all the medical reports with us and translating it into phrases we understand. He is a doctor and has given us great advice not just as a doctor, but as a father, and a man of God. I am still sane today because of him. People have emailed me to ask when they can bring us a meal after Jack's home. One of my closest friends gave me a great book she found called, "Are those children yours?". I don't ever have to worry about how are we going to accomplish this great task ahead of us, I know my support system will be there in more ways than I can think of, carrying the load when it gets to heavy to carry on our own.

With a little help from my friends...okay maybe a lot of help from my friends, I can do this, I can handle all the hoops I have to jump through to bring Jack home, learn what I need to about raising a child with a cleft lip and palate, deal with the emotional issues children can feel about being adopted and a different race from their parents, and even having two kiddos!!!

Thank you to each one of you who have done one of the thousands of things that have blessed my heart during this process. You are a blessing to my family and I will forever be grateful.