Bright spot on my calendar.

There is a noticeably bright spot on my calendar this month.  Can you see it?

Yep, there it is.  That's the one.  It's the date my son gets to come home.

And it's tomorrow.

Last Weekend! (Hurray!!!)

This is our LAST WEEKEND!  This is the last time we will pick him up, knowing he will only be here for 2 days.  This Sunday will be the last time we have to let him walk back out our door.  

I am SO excited to see my boy tonight.  I'm even MORE excited that he will be living with us full time in only a WEEK! Then we will just get to work on being a family.  We'll get to establish every day, normal routines.  My laundry will probably multiply exponentially, but such is life.  Life with a child.  (enter happy, contented sigh here).

Best. Announcement. EVER.

It's been a little quiet on the blog lately.  It's partly because I haven't known what to say.  Or, rather, what I could say.

But now, I have an announcement to make.  And it's a pretty awesome announcement.

We are planning to adopt a little boy!  

We have spent the past two weekends with him, and are absolutely in love.  He is almost 6, loves Yarbo, and he already feels like a part of our family.

God has a way of timing things just right.  And this time is no different.  I really struggled with the timing of everything in adoption.  I didn't understand why things seemed to take so long, why it was so hard to find kids we could take in and adopt, when there were clearly children in need.

A few weeks ago, during some particularly difficult days, I was reminded so much of God's faithfulness.  I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and what it meant in my life. On Thursday, April 7th, I literally had just finished this post on God's faithfulness, when the phone rang.

Moments after deciding that I wanted to constantly thank God for his continuing faithfulness, no matter my circumstances, I answered the phone to hear the voice of a social worker.

"We have a little boy who needs a home," she said.

I instantly teared up.

She told me more of his story. "He is one of the sweetest boys you will ever meet," she said.  "He's just such a great kid."

Once again, God's timing was perfect.  And, I think I needed to trust Him more before I was ready for this blessing.

We have spent two weekends with him now, and let me tell you:  I have lost my heart.  Completely.  When he leaves our house, it suddenly feels empty.  He brings such joy to our hearts.

Thank you to everyone who has been praying for us - please keep praying!  We will have a lot of things to work through as we transition him to our home.  Please pray that the transition will be as smooth as possible, and that God would give us the wisdom we need to best parent this precious child.

The morning we got the call, I called Dave and was so excited I could barely talk, so he asked me, "What's his name?"

"Isaac," I said, somewhat breathless from excitement.

"How fitting," he said.  "In the Bible, Isaac was the child of promise."

Changin it up!

As previously mentioned, I've been ridiculously busy lately, and the house .....well..... please give me fair warning before you come over, so I can give you fair warning of what you'd be walking into!

Anyway, I was trying to sort through some things and organize, and I started a "cancer" pile.  A few favorite scarves or hats, my wig, a HUGE stack of cards from many of you, and stuff like that.  It was wonderful to realize that I no longer need those - I can completely put them away, I don't need them anymore!

Next, Dave joined me and we were working on the downstairs, and needed a place to put our massive adoption homework binder.  I looked over at our side table in the living room, and noticed that we still had the big section of cancer info - the place where I kept info given to me by doctors, notes from appointments, stuff I was supposed to read, etc.  We happily replaced that with our adoption binder.  

This has been a huge year for us.  Big highs, big lows.  And it feels wonderful to start boxing up the cancer stuff, and replacing cancer info with the adoption binder.   Even if the binder does mean lots of work.  Somehow, it looks so much nicer, and the room just seems....happier.

One more snack food eliminated....

I've been looking through labels in my kitchen and working to get rid of, or at least be aware of, the items that contain soy.  Today, I came across some favorite snack crackers that listed several oils, included "interesterified soy bean" oil.  And, yes, I copied the spelling directly off the side of the box, that is not a typo(well, not my typo anyway).  What in the world does that even mean?  I'm both curious, and not certain that I want to know.

I've always been pretty good about looking at the nutritional values in products (calories, fats, carbs, sugars, fiber, etc), but looking at all the ingredients has been....interesting, to say the least.  Or maybe I should say, "interesterified?"

Anyone have any favorite snack foods that are healthy, and still soy-free?  I'm looking for ideas, since my 2 favorite whole grain snack crackers are now off limits!

A soy-free, hormone-free adventure.

One thing I'm finding out about cancer is that it affects a lot of your life.  I know that seems pretty....obvious, but I'm still learning a lot about what that means for me personally.  Some things are large-scale life adjustments, like having to adjust our adoption plan and learning to trust God for our family at a whole new level.   Some of them are smaller things, like not being able to get blood pressure taken on my right arm anymore (due to the loss of lymph nodes), which isn't all that life-altering.  Then, there's the medium kind of adjustments, one of which is change in diet. 

I love soy.  I used to eat dry-roasted soybeans a lot, because they were a very lean source of protein and had lots of filling fiber.  I think it tastes delicious, and it's in tons of health foods, in the form of protein, soybean oil, etc.   I even had a delicious low-calorie chocolate-mint cupcake recipe that used soy flour.   Unfortunately, soy also produces estrogen, and estrogen feeds my type of cancer.  It's not like a food allergy - one soybean won't really have any kind of an impact on me.  But, my doctors have recommended cutting soy out of my normal diet.  It's not a big deal if I eat things that contain soy occasionally, but my "routine" food shouldn't contain soy anymore.  I didn't think it would be that big of a deal, until I started checking each item that in our pantry.  Wow....

In addition, I am supposed to switch to hormone-free meat and poultry.  At this point, it's starting to feel like quite the adjustment!

What a blessing it is that God created me with a love of cooking!  I've always liked healthy cooking, but this is really altering my understanding of what's healthy for me personally.   And, now that so many of the healthy pre-packaged foods are off-limits, I'll be making more and more things at home, so I'll know exactly what is (and is not) in them.   In addition, I am working on finding ways to be picky about our food, and be very frugal at the same time.  So, in the upcoming months, I'll be sharing bits and pieces of our culinary adventures. 

For starters, we bought a cow.  Actually, we are buying a cow with several other families, as I'm pretty sure an entire cow would be a lot of meat.  I'll keep you posted with that, as it's an adventure in and of itself!  It's taking a lot for me to to be able to acknowledge/cope with the fact that our beef will actually come from a cow. I've always liked just thinking about my beef coming from the backroom in the store, so it's a pretty big mental adjustment, since I really like cows, and enjoy petting them when I can.  I've had to use the word, "carcass" and, "hanging weight" in sentences, and while I almost threw up once during the conversation with the very kind, patient farmer, I'm really looking forward to seeing how this all pans out! I think we get the meat towards the end of this month.

In the meantime, I've been working a bit on the layout of the blog.  In addition to wanting to learn more myself, I want to provide resources for others facing cancer, or looking forward to adoption, so stop over and check it out - and be sure to add any favorite resources you might have!

Change in direction!

First, let me apologize.  I promised to tell you "very soon" what the new direction in our lives would be, and...well...it's taken me a little longer than I expected.  I recently found out people were taking bets on what it is, so to relieve the suspense, I'll tell you now!  We are working towards adoption!  Now, here's the back story.

We had always thought we would have some biological children, and adopt some children.  After trying for biological children for three years, that wasn't looking real great.  Breast cancer was the final kicker on that one, for several medical reasons.  So, we changed our plan, and decided that we'd adopt all of our children.  We wanted to adopt infants at first, which would probably mean overseas adoption, and then later adopt older children, possibly from the foster care system.

For the most part, in private adoptions, birth parents choose the adoptive parents for their children.  You're not guaranteed to be placed with a child no matter what, but having breast cancer in my recent history makes it even more difficult to be chosen.  So, we planned to adopt overseas.  We chose a an agency, chose our countries we were interested in, filled out our application, and paid the deposit.  The next day, we received a phone call.  "Um, about your breast cancer....was that recent?" they asked.  "Yes," I said, "I just finished treatment in July!  However, my oncologist has completely cleared me for adoption, and is willing to provide a reference or anything you need."  I thought they would be excited for me!  After all, we want to bring orphaned children into our home.  What could go wrong?  "Well, we don't work with people who've had cancer until it's been 5 years."  I couldn't believe it.  I understand that some kinds of cancers unfortunately give you a much smaller long-term survival rate than others - but mine isn't one of them!  Even my specific type of breast cancer is among the "better" kinds to have.  So, we changed our plan, and decided we would adopt through the foster system first.

At this point, we are signed up for our first class on adoption through DHS (required first step).  After this first class, they run background checks (fingers crossed....j/k!), then we take 6 weeks of classes, finish our home study, then work towards placement.  The process can take 6-8 months, sometimes more, ocassionally less. 

We've always wanted children, and we've always agreed that God already knows our children. He "knows the plans he has for us," and we trust that He has chosen our children specifically for us, and chosen us for them.  Admittedly, we have struggled with not understanding why some people have families so easily, while it has been such a struggle for us.  But, at the end of it all, we believe and trust in God.  It's one thing to say we have faith when things are easy, but it's a blessing to have a chance to see that God is still faithful even when things are hard.  Please note, I did not say it feels good.  But truly, it is a blessing. 

We're uncertain what our future as potential parents looks like.   Adopting older children can have extra challenges, and we're pretty sure that don't have all the answers.  I doubt we have even half of the answers.  But, we do have the knowledge that our salvation is sure because of Christ's death and resurrection, and we have the love of Christ in our hearts - and we'll happily share that every day of our parenting careers. 

So, please pray for us -for wisdom, direction, and strength.  We're excited, a bit nervous, and eagerly anticipating seeing what God has in store for us!