I know what your thinking.  REALLY???  Carrie is blogging?  That's the first word I heard when we told our family and friends that we were adopting.  That's the first word I said when Ryan told me 4 years ago that he thought we should adopt.  That's the first word Ryan said when I finally told him I was ready to adopt after now having four children of our own.  Yes REALLY but not a really with a question mark.  A REALLY with an exclamation point!!!  A REALLY that says Yes Lord what ever you ask. Shout it from the mountain top! Praise God from whom all blessings flow!!
   As some of you know we are already at the end of our process we just received our travel approval so we should be getting our little boy soon.  I wanted to blog about our process For those of you who have been asking about our journey as well as this will be a place to check in and see what is happening in China while we are there, so you can know how to pray.  Mostly I am blogging this for our little boy. I want things to be written down so he can see how God knew from the beginning he was meant to be in our family and how God lead us to each other.
    Now just so you know I am not good with grammar or spelling or even getting my thoughts down on paper in an order that a normal writer would write.  But if you read this blog I hope you will see How an Amazing God reveals Himself to a lowly sinner like me.  That you will see that if you follow God step by step even when you can't see whats coming that He knows the Whole picture. That amazing things can happen just by taking baby steps.
    That's what Ryan and I have done.  We just keep taking baby steps and God just keeps opening the doors and slowly revealing the next step to complete his plan for our family.   Who would have thought Ryan and I would have Four children let alone adopt a child from china.   I don't like noise.  I don't like kayos but four kids and 2 dogs later that's pretty much my life and I love it (well there are many times that I ask my self "Why did we get two dogs?"  ha ha  But I wouldn't trade this life for anything.
    So about the adoption. This is my perspective on things maybe I will get Ryan to add his in sometime:)  Anyways  about a year and a half ago I started to get the baby itch. Averi was a little over a year and I started asking God REALLY am I done having kids??  I hate being pregnant, I am sick for literally 9 months, I feel like I'm getting old, can I handle another pregnancy and take care of my 4 children.  One morning I was cleaning out all the papers in our office and I stumbled across an adoption pamphlet I sent out for when Ryan brought up adoption about 4 years ago.  I started looking through it and my heart started stirring.  As I was looking through it  I found a book in the back that I didn't see when I looked through the folder 4 years ago.  I decided to read it.  It was all about a families journey in adopting there child from Romania.  This moved in my heart.  I thought, God do you think we should do this.  Can I handle this.  Would Ryan be up for a Fifth child? Well I tried to continue on with my life but I just couldn't get this adoption thing out of my head.  Let alone I was always praying for a friend of mine who was adopting.  So finally I brought it up to Ryan and then I heard that word REALLY???   Really you think we can handle another child?  Well in my brain I would say well no but in my heart I would say well YES. Why not our life is crazy already.
    So that started our journey.  We just took those baby step. The more we took steps the more this seemed right.  We went to a couple different adoption information meetings.  There was alot of information and overwhelming amount of questions.  Questions about adoption in general and questions to God saying "REALLY?"  "Do you want us to do this?"  "Is this the best thing for our family?"  Ryan seemed layed back about it.  I asked him are you really on board with this?  He said I've always been on board.  So I kept praying about it watching Ryan to see if he was really serious.  
  Then Ryan sprung this one on me "I think we should adopt a special need child".  WHAT!!  I thought to myself.  If you know Ryan and I you would know that Ryan is a very hard worker.  His job has him working 10 -12 hour days even weekend at times and in the winter I can't plan anything with him in it because his job is dependant on the weather.  So if he can join us he will and if not I am a single parent. Ha Ha(we joke about that all the time)   
So when he told me we should adopt a special needs child I was floored.  
   The more I started looking into what special needs meant I found out there where a couple different categories.  There were children with special needs that would need LOTS of attention and help etc.. and there were children that had minor needs that could be corrected but were taken out of the healthy kid program and labeled special needs.  I was still scared of the label and I tried to find my way around adopting a special needs child.  But the more I looked into it we where told we could either adopt a child older than lexi so 11 years or older or we could adopt domestically and infant but we would be waiting a long time since we already had four kids of our own, we could adopt a toddler internationally and wait 3 or more years or we could adopt a special needs child in most likely a little over a year.  
   Well I am not getting any younger and my kids are only getting older. So I felt like if we were to adopt it needed to be sooner than later.   So I was laying in bed praying about it thinking maybe we should just do domestic and see what happens.  I was praying asking God to give me a peace about what to do so I said ok "God we are doing domestic period." I closed my eyes to sleep and I kept picturing a little Asian boy.  I said "God REALLY?"  REALLY God, is there a little boy from China that has a minor need that we as a family can handle?  I mean God it will have to be REALLY minor need.  The picture of the boy was still in my head.  Finally after wrestling with God I said YES.  We are going to adopt a little boy from china with a special need and Bam! I had and instant peace.  
   So There you have it.  REALLY.  We are adopting a little boy from China with a special need:)