One of my favorite sayings is a line stolen from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (which hearkens back to my high school days): “Something’s afoot at the Circle K.” And ever since we announced our desire and intention to adopt not one, but two, children from Ethiopia, I’ve felt “something’s afoot.”

I have no doubt that we made the right choice, because this choice was confirmed through fasting and prayer. Even the manner in which the idea sort of fell into my husband’s lap at the same time I’d been considering it points to my Heavenly Father’s... more

Adopting from Haiti and other poverty-stricken countries can be a difficult journey for some families because sometimes children simply pass away during the wait. Living in a developed country as we do, it can be easy to forget that infant death and even older child death is a frequent occurrence in other nations. We take for granted things like medical insurance, prescription plans, and access to quality healthcare, while for people in places like Haiti, these are incomprehensible luxuries. In the case of our friend’s son-to-be, it is supremely frustrating to know that he’s only two hours from people and resources that could take care of his medical needs, yet there is so much in the way... more

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the miraculous story of many Liberian orphans being adopted by families within the same community. Amazingly, we have a little something like that going on where we live. In our little ward, we have four families, including our own, all involved in the various stages of Haiti adoption. I look forward to the day when all these new children join our ward and dramatically shift the demographics of our Primary!

Last Friday, two of these friends came over to my house so we could work on our dossiers together – theirs for Haiti and ours for Ethiopia. Ultimately, we didn’t get a whole lot of paperwork done because we spent a good chunk of our time... more

When we took that first step, neither of us could know how just how many potholes, hills, exits, traffic jams and accidents there would prove to be on that road, or how many beautiful and amazing sights we’d see along the way!

Our dossier went to China in late August 2001 after five months of loving preparation. The very next month, we received devastating news. My husband was losing his job. The ENT physician he was working with had quit, and the hospital didn’t think my husband’s job as an audiologist was safe without an ENT on staff. Because it’s a small hospital, they had no idea how long it would take to recruit another.

We had just hawked everything that wasn’t... more