The following is written by Matt and Ann Marie and is edited by the EAAC for the purposes of this blog.
Just the other day, we saw our oldest son smile after tickling him. It melted our hearts.
Our oldest son. There are times we’d never thought we’d say that. Our son. After years of trying to have children – going through rounds of natural attempts, then rounds of IUI and IVF, and finally having a doctor say that it was just not possible – we heard what we had been feeling all along.
The truth is perhaps adoption was where we were being called. We’d always known we wanted to adopt at some point in our family. We’d laid out a path for us – have a child or two of our own, then go through a traditional adoption to add to our existing family.
On the day when the doctor told us we weren’t going to be able to have a child no matter what we did, this was the moment when we knew adoption wasn’t the second option, like we’d been planning. This is what we were supposed to do all along. This was a calling for our lives and our family. It was not second best, it was the very best.
Matt’s parents had been volunteers at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, and through Focus, we’d learned of embryo adoption and the hundreds of thousands of homeless snowflake babies waiting in frozen orphanages. We again felt called, so we jumped into the process.
That process was challenged by our military duty location at the time, assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel. How were we going to find a certified social worker in Israel to do a home study? How would we track down a way to get our background checks completed? And if they wouldn’t ship embryos overseas, how could we even do the transfer? One by one, those doors opened, resolving each problem and making it further clear that this is what was intended for us.
As we returned to the US, we found ourselves stationed at one of only a handful of bases with a military doctor who specialized in infertility and could administer the medicine protocol and perform the transfer. Out of dozens of possible locations to be stationed, we were in the one spot that had the right doctor at the right time.
Stay tuned next Friday for the conclusion of Matt and Ann Marie’s amazing and inspirational story.
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