Three years ago today, I officially became the mom of two boys!
Everyone’s journey to motherhood is different and each child’s story is unique. I’m going to focus on my middle child Nathan’s story as I celebrate his “Gotcha day” today!
In March 2012, my husband and I became certified foster parents, and two days after we completed our certification we received a call for placement. We were shocked because we had been told it could be months even years before we received a phone call about a child which is why we had started the process when our son was 9 months old. In our minds, we thought we should start early so that way our son 
would be around 18 months before we started getting calls for placement. Well clearly God had a different plan for us, and overnight we became a family of four with two children under a year!
Nathan was three months old the day we brought him home and he had spent those first months of his life in the NICU. So not only did I have two children under 10 months old, one of them was a medically needy baby. Well fast forward 19 months full of the chaos of the court system, numerous surgeries, hundreds of days in the ICU to November 23, 2013, where we sat in the City courthouse.
There is something surreal about sitting in a courtroom with your family and closest friends and having a judge declare that the child in your arms is finally your child. In the 19 months that he lived in our home as our foster son, there was not a moment that I didn’t feel like he was mine but that 
day is one of the happiest days in my life because he was now official Nathaniel Poole! Because he had been in foster care, we had not been able to share any photos or even talk about him on social media, so we joked he was our “secret child” to close friends. I was so excited after court to finally announce and introduce Nathan to world via Facebook! We were blessed to have a friend do an adoption announcement photo shoot a few weeks before and she had coordinated to post the photos when the ceremony was over and another friend offered to photograph our adoption ceremony. Both sets of photos, I will cherish forever because court was such a blur to me! The day was filled with excitement and I was finally able to have peace and no anxiety because he was finally mine! I am forever blessed to be Nate’s mom and so thankful every day for him!
If you have ever considered adoption, I urge you to look into it or contact me for more information. November is national adoption month and there are currently over 400,000 children in foster care and a little over 100,000 of those are currently waiting to be adopted.
