Buford and Beulah- 8/22/09

Ok... here we go!  Noel and I have decided to start our family by adoption.  Let this journey begin...
Before we got married we talked about making adoption be a part of how be build our family.  It was always something that we talked about doing "someday."  Someday has now arrived.  We have been praying for our children for years now.  We pray that they will love Jesus as much as we do, that they will be happy, successful, and will love others like Christ did.  We often talked about what we think they would look like. Will they have brown, blonde, or red hair?  Will it be curly or straight?  Will they have brown, blue, or green eyes?  Everyone wants children who look like them- a little girl who looks just like mommy and a little boy who looks just like daddy. 
We have faced fertility issues for about 2 and a half years now.  We have never been told that we cannot have children, so we have come to peace in knowing that it just hasn't been the Lord's timing.  Through much prayer and many conversations with each other, we feel that the Lord is leading us to adoption to start our family.  What an overwhelming task lies ahead.  We are quickly finding that there is much more work and expense involved in adoption than conception :)
We have already probably gotten too far ahead of ourselves.  We are thinking about what we need to buy, what things we need to do to "child proof" our house, and picking out baby names.  All this without even attending an adoption orientation yet.  So far, our plan is to adopt an infant domestically.  We are looking into a couple of adoption agencies and are also open to finding a birthmother and pursuing a private adoption.  Our first orientation is on 8/27 at Methodist Mission Home here in San Antonio.  Our next orientation is on 9/12 at a agency in Houston.
We spent the weekend in Dobbin spending time my family because my Dad had back surgery (again).  In the many hours we spent in the waiting room and traveling back and forth to the hospital, we had to find ways to keep ourselves entertained.  So we tossed around the ideas of baby names.  Since we were in the country, the most suitable names we could come up with were Buford for a boy and Beulah for a girl.   You must first understand the life of those who live in the country and second, you must understand mine and Noel's sense of humor.  So, for now, we are affectionately referring to our baby-to-be as Buford or Beulah...