My husband and I shared a lot of the same fears when we started this journey.

How would this change our family dynamic? Could we afford this leap of faith? But most of our fears involved our bio children, Charlie and Sofie. How would this affect them? Would they be harmed? And to be honest it has affected them deeply—they are more empathetic and care for the struggles people are going through. As far as how we overcame our fears—we really haven’t. Every time we say “yes” we go through new waves of fear and hesitation, but we are backed by a strong faith. A faith that says we can and should love because we were loved first. This faith lets us step into the fear and the unknown to continue to say “yes” and provide a haven for a child in need.

When I first met my child…

We had a long wait where we didn’t receive a referral call but we used that time to educate ourselves on trauma parenting. Finally we received a call for a four year old little boy. They pulled into our driveway and we stepped out to meet them. The cutest little boy hopped out of the car and into our lives with a kick at some leaves and a, “Hi I’m Michael, what’s your name?”

It wasn’t always easy and it took a lot of work at times because we both had our different expectations. He brought expectations with how he spent his first four years and we had expectations with our previous parenting experiences. We learned together—we learned that you can’t parent any child the same as the last. We learned different ways of communicating, different ways to show affection, and different ways to discipline. We highly recommend the book The Connected Child by Dr. Karen Purvis to help with this transition. At the end of the day—it fell into place and we can’t imagine our life without him.

If you peeked into our lives for a day, you may see complete chaos. We went from two kids to five kids—multiple appointments and multiple visits on top of homeschooling.

It may look like completely chaos, but to think that if we hadn’t followed that pull—we would have never known this kind of love. The blessing of foster care and adoption has let us learn to love more passionately, hurt deeply for stories of vulnerable children, and grieve the change of a family dynamic where you transition a baby you love like your own home to be with their own family. Opening your heart and home is risky—but when we lose ourselves we gain.