[t-square]

Many of us have had "signs" that led us to adopt or that have occurred during the process. As they love to say, what was your sign??

1. When we went to the bank to get the loan, the painting on the back wall was of an indigenous woman with a swaddled baby wrapped in her arms. The other painting was of a cowboy with a baby deer in his arms and he was feeding it with a bottle. The title of the paiting - "The Adoption" - we both walked out with goosebumps.
2. After creating the Semillas video and listening a million times to the "Somewhere over the Rainbow" song, it sort of became a theme song for the Semillas families. When we were on our visit trip last week, after our meeting with the Embassy, we went to dinner at the hotel. As we were relaxing and having a glass of wine, the theme song came on - exact rendition!!! Gives us lots of hope!

[kzwief]

Well, we have had lots of signs during this adoption:

1. Katelyn's birthday is Kevin's grandmother's birthday.
2. Kate's birthmom has the same birthday as me, December 26th.
3. We got her referral on her 2 month birthday.

I am hoping that seeing today is our 7 month anniversary in PGN that maybe we might get OUT? LOL! I think I would fall over if that happened!

[ej-momtobe]

I was just talking about this to DH yesterday.

Over 2 years ago, we were getting ready to leave home for our first visit trip later that day. I took my dog out for a walk in the park near our house where we walk almost every day. He sniffed at something on the ground, and I looked down to see that it was something shiny. At first I thought it was a pop top. But it was too shiney. so i picked it up, and it was my gold earring! I had lost it about 6 months before and had looked everywhere for it (except the park). The park had months of construction, heavy equipment, lawn mowing, etc, and there was my earring in the rough, untouched, with only a minor scratch. DH had given me the earrings for Christmas a few years ago, right after we got engaged.

So that was my sign that things were 'meant to be' and that the dog would get along great with DS.

[Slatond10]

It has been awhile so I can't remember all the "signs" but there were TONS of them and I do have them journaled.

1 - While researching agencies and trying to decided I read a passage in the bible that something like your "your children will be handed into your arms from a far away country" I have the exact verse recorded in my journal. I assume I took it completely out of context but it still felt like a "sign."

2- When I got the referral DD's last name was the same as one of the families that wrote a reference letter for me and it was their child that had stolen my heart and made me realize I had to move forward with adoption. ( needless to say I kept her birth name since it was one of my "signs")

3- When I got "PINK", I was driving to work that AM and saw the most beautiful sunrise that turned the entire sky a brilliant pink.... and I just knew it was my day. But when I called the agency they didn't have information. However, they called me back that evening @ 7:30PM to let me know that I was in fact pink and needed to travel w/in 48 hrs!

[lcikra00]

We have had one continuous sign throughout this process. Once we accepted Sofia's referral butterflies started appearing all around our house. When we went on trips and missed having our baby with us, butterflies would appear. Even so much as to land on me day after day. When I am having a hard time, missing my baby so desperately, a butterfly will appear and flutter around me. This is our sign and it is what assures me that we are connected and a meant to be together. She is our little Sofia Butterfly.

[IHOP]

I do believe my mother in heaven helped us and protected us during this adoption......

Money we used for the adoption came from the sale of my childhood home

We were Officially on the Guatemala List on her birthday

We rec'd pre-approval on the anniversary of her passing

We were home on my parent's wedding anniversary (divorced though)

I just had this eering feeling that she helped us along this bumpy process - I will be forever grateful that we had no setbacks in our adoption.

[prayingmommy]

Great thread. Here are a couple of mine in adopting DD:
1. In trying to decide which country, I prayed hard just before falling asleep. That night I had a dream I was in a room filled with children. I chose a girl named Maria. DD's name is Maria.
2. DS's name is Mason Alexander. DD's birth name: Maria Alejandra. We accepted DD's referral on DS's birthday.

[KarynB]

Great thread! I hope you don't mind me butting in from the Africa forum (WAY too quiet over there!).

1. I was REALLY waffling on South Africa - referrals were super slow and I just didn't "feel it". Then I looked up a baby home that our social worker was trying to open up to International Adoptions and it had the exact same address including neighbourhood as the one I grew up in!!! I grew up in Calgary, AB and this was 15,000 miles away in South Africa. Anyways, from that moment I knew we were in the right program and that the new baby home WOULD open to adoptions - it did and our son is one of only a handful of babies from there before it shut its doors again last year.

2. "John" is a family name - DH's middle name, both of our fathers names, our oldest DS middle name. When we got our referral they told us his birth name (Zulu) and also what the caregivers called him for the past three months - Johnny! Needless to say it is now his middle name....

[ohiovirginia]

After many years of trying assisted reproduction and failed domestic adoption, I had pretty much given up all hope of having children. Then my best friend from childhood emailed me a picture of our daughter and told us about the agency trying to find her forever family.
For us, one of the signs was the meaing of our daughter's name - her name means The Lord Answers. He definitely does and we have been very blessed.

[KKR213]

I had several signs as well.

As I was driving to my mother's house with my referral packet and stuck in traffic, I was staring at John's picture and was amazed how much he looked like my nephew as a baby.

Also I heard a song on the radio by Reba McEntire - Gonna Be. It is about raising a child. It was the first and only time I heard it on the radio.

When I received the DNA report in the mail I saw that John's birthmother and I share a birthday...February 13th.

On my visit trip in February our room number was 317 and that was the date I got out of PGN - March 17th.

A friend emailed me the morning of 3/17/06 that she had a dream about us playing with John at my mother's house and 2 hours later I got the out call!

The day that I got my call about Pink I woke up so sick and went into work late and about 15 minutes later found out my embassy appointment was in 5 days! My co-workers joked that it was my version of morning sickness!

And this final sign I just discovered or made the connection this weekend. As my grandmother was getting older she started to give some of her jewelry that my grandfather had bought her away to her grandchildren. She gave me several items and since I am not a big jewelry wearer I have them in the my bureau. This weekend I was cleaning stuff out and found a necklace and ring from Grammie which are jade and who knows possibly from Guatemala. It was a nice feeling.

[StephL]

The signs I felt God giving us back in 2007 are what I constantly think about to help me keep my faith that someday, somehow, our son will come home. Here are just a couple:
Before we even found out about our infertility, before we even were having testing done, I had an overwhelming feeling one day in April to pray for the birthmother of our child. We had been trying for over a year to get pregnant, and my husband was not really at the point that he wanted to get any testing or anything done. But I felt very very strongly that our family was going to be started through adoption, because all sorts of other little “signs” (i mean, truly, the list could go on and on) were starting to pop up here and there. So there I was one day, lah dee dah, walking to the fridge to get something for lunch, and BAM. I just felt immediately that I had to pray for someone out there who was either pregnant, giving birth, maybe deciding whether to give the baby up for adoption, or something like that. It scared me; because I knew right then that I was not going to get pregnant, at least not at this point in time. But I knew then for sure that we were going to end up adopting and there was someone out there who was pregnant with “our” child. Hope that doesn’t sound too crazy! I still get chills when i think back to that day. It was really a life changing day.
He was born on October 18th. This is the birthday of my closest friend, and a day after my father in law’s birthday.
We received our referral two days before our 4 year anniversary. I prayed and prayed that God would bring us our child before our anniversary, and had just given up, when we got the phone call!!

Our adoption seems totally uncertain right now, but when I look back on these signs, I wonder how I could ever doubt that he will come home. God brought this child into our lives for a reason. And I believe it is to be our son.

Steph

[StefB]

I had signs as well. Here's a good one: On referral day, after spending many minutes, in tears, looking at the 5 or 6 pictures, it dawned on me that the dress she wore in the referral pics was the same as one I had bought for my future daughter a couple of weeks earlier.

[robandjulie]

Great thread, I really felt like we were given a lot of encouragement to do this when we started. I'll do two: our house and my church:

The house:
We started discussing adoption while we were also debating between 3 different new jobs for me, each of which involved a move, but to very different parts of the US. Two of the jobs were very prestigious in big exciting expensive cities and the other was a good job in a smaller city near DH's family. We knew we wanted more kids and the prospect of being near family was appealing and since adoption is expensive, a less expensive city meant a better quality of life for our family. We went back and forth on it and DH flew up to tour some real estate and get some idea of what we could afford here. We found our absolute dream home for an amazing price but we still weren't sure. A week later I flew into town to check out the house and to meet with the potential job AGAIN to see if we were sure about this. Anyhow, as I was touring the house I sat down in the living room and was stressing out about all the changes and questions we were facing at once. I actually asked for some sort of sign that we were heading in the right direction here--which I never do. I looked 3 feet away from my face and there was a framed poem on the wall about how God leads some women to adopt and how it's God's calling and that it's 2 women who are doing the best thing for one child. I knew right then that this was our home and we were doing the right thing.

Turns out all three of the children in the seller's family were through adoption and once we told them we were adopting they let us start using the address as soon as we put the offer on the house, even though we didn't close for almost 5 more months. So we could start filing papers and such with our "new" address. If we hadn't done that and had to wait until we actually closed and moved we would likely not have ended up getting it all done in time. If we'd moved to the other cities we would not have had the money to do this at all (cost of living here is about 1/3 of the other two cities). This was it for us.

One more:
With our bio DD we were 3 mos pregnant around Christmas time and at one mass there was a "blessing of expectant mothers" in honor of Mary. No one knew we were pregnant yet so when we stood up--and we were the only ones!--our priest spotted us and exclaimed "oh, how wonderful!" It was so joyous to celebrate that with our parish that day.

A few weeks after we started the adoption paperwork in earnest, we were at our church which we would be moving away from in a few months. There was a call to mothers to stand for a blessing again and DH and I exchanged a look and opted not to stand. I was so bummed we didn't get to celebrate it with them, but wasn't ready to make it that public. About 8 weeks later we were there for our last mass--we were moving 900 miles away the next week. I commented to DH that I still regretted not getting to celebrate our expectation of this adoption and he agreed. About 5 minutes later the Alleluia verse was sung out and it was this: "You were given a spirit of adoption, through which we cry out 'Abba;". Dh and I stood up and grinned like idiots for the rest of the day. Guess we got our blessing after all.

And it never fails that when we're having a rough day and aren't sure, we run into another adoptive family. When our first referral died I was heartbroken and stayed home physically ill for two days. I wasn't sure we were supposed to do this. On the 3rd day I called my department chair to let her know why I had canceled my classes and was not around and as soon as I told her she nearly cried with me: turns out she is an adoptive mother of two. The sheer number of adoptive familes we have met just out and about since we started this has been staggering. Today at the mall I was talking to a woman with two kids (I assume bio) and was asking her about her double stroller since I've been eyeing them a lot lately. She answered and said "yes, well, we're expecting a third now so we'll see what we need then" and honestly my first instinct was to ask "domestic or international" instead of "when are you due." It's become so incredibly normal to me.

[judymend]

Here were 2 of our signs:

• I've been using the numbers 315 for everything in my life for many, many years now and Peter Jack's birthday is 3/15.
• We went to an Open House next to our home, on our street, just for the kicks of it...well, the Realtor was on the phone when we entered, and she waved us in and signaled that she would be just a moment. When she came over to greet us she said "Oh, I'm so sorry for making you wait, I was on the line with a dear friend who just came home with their adopted son from Russia, and I was congratulating her"! Well, that started us on a huge conversation about our adoption process. The Realtor was so moved by the twist of fate meeting that tears began to stream down her face. She said that it wasn't an accident that we had met, and that she wanted us to purchase a St. Gerard for our Adoption Journey. Well, after our heartfelt meeting with this wonderful human being, we decided to go buy the St. Gerard - so off we went the next day and found the store where we could find St. Gerard, which we had never been to before. When we parked the car in front of the store, exactly in front was a Guatemalan Bakery! I WAS AMAZED & FELT SO BLESSED AT THAT VERY MOMENT!