Arriving At Our Little Village

I'm not entirely sure where I deviated from my original life plan, but I distinctly remember telling just about EVERYONE that I was NOT going to have an extremely large family. I was going to have 4 kids; 2 boys, 2 girls! That's it! I came from a family of 10 kids, and a big family of my own was not on my agenda. I had decided that you just don't get to have as much fun in a big family, or so I thought at the time. You don't get to go on luxurious vacations, you can't go out to eat at a restaurant as often, you usually have to share a bedroom, you frequently get the added pleasure of wearing your sibling's hand-me-downs, and don't even get me started on the amount of dishes and laundry involved....

Yet, here I sit, some 20 years later and I have the largest family out of all my siblings. In my defense, it kind of snuck up on me. Things we going as planned. I had two boys and one girl, when we decided to become foster-adopt parents. We turned in all of our paper work and asked to be placed with one girl, age five or younger. But then something happened. They called us and asked us if we would consider a one year old boy..... Hmmmm.

We said, Sure, why not? This little guy need a place to call home, to be loved and we could do that. This only deviates from OUR plan a little, right? If this little guy needed to stay forever, we could have 3 boys and 2 girls, right? I can be flexible! The foster placement quickly turned into an adoption placement and 9 months later we were adopting our first little guy. We felt so blessed to have this rambunctious little guy permanently in our lives.

We did get a few girls in between our next long term placement, but they didn't stay very long. About a year and a half after adopting our first son, we received another call form Social Services wanting to know if we could possibly take in 4 brothers. They had to move the boys from the temporary Crisis Center that day, and they had nowhere to put them. The boys had already been living in the facility a week and the Crisis Center told social services that they need to move the boys. Now.

I couldn't believed the words that slipped out of my mouth before even thinking about it. "Sure, we'll take them!" I paused.... I mean, why not? These little guys needed a place to call home and to be loved until a long term home could be found for them, and we could do that, right? I think you are already guessing what happened next. We quickly fell head over heals for these sweet boys and, yes, they needed a forever home too. We were extremely blessed to have those 4 boys join our family. Taking us from 3 kids to 8 kids in 2 years.

We thought we were done! But then a few months later our daughter started praying daily for a sister. Her prayers apparently were contagious, because soon another child was praying for a sister, then another. Finally a little over a year after we adopted the boys, we decided to go "off hold" and ask for another placement. We asked again for a girl, age 5 or younger. I told our Family Resource Consultant if she called me with a boy, I would unfriend her on facebook and stop talking to her! I was of course joking... kind of. ;)

But I don't think that anything could have prepared us for what happened  next. We finally got that call that we had been waiting for. It was a call for a girl, it was an adoption placement, and within our age range, except... instead of ONE girl, this placement was for THREE sisters. I really think that God may have misunderstood.... Our children were praying COLLECTIVELY, not individually, for a sister. ;) I once heard a quote that has stayed with me through the years. "If you want to make God laugh, tell him YOUR plans." God had different plans for our family. Obviously better plans than our own!

My husband and I talked about how crazy we were to even consider it. I mean who has ELEVEN CHILDREN now-a-days??? Except maybe the Duggars. They have more than 11! But we were not the Duggars... and they're amazing! I'm not amazing... I'm just me; no one incredibly beautiful, super smart, impeccably popular, or particularly important. Was I a mom that could really raise 11 children to be the best people that they could possibly be? What would this mean for ALL of our children? What would this mean for my husband and I? But at the same time... my husband and I felt a peace about this placement that could only come from God. We told social services that we would love to have them. After all, over the last few years, we had learned to do some very hard things. We had grown, and WE HAD BECOME MORE FLEXIBLE. These little girls needed a place to call their forever home and to be loved and we could do that, right? They would be surrounded by family members that loved them and that literally prayed them there!

They came to our family on my birthday, just after Christmas. Wide eyed and terrified. We all did our best to help them through that difficult transition that had become somewhat familiar at this point. We fell in love with these girls and we are currently in the process of making them permanent members of our family. They are eager to be adopted.

Even though we are well known and well loved by family, friends and our community, I thought even the people who knew and loved us would have something to say about this. I mean, WHO HAS 11 CHILDREN now-a-days??? Surprisingly, at least to me (I'm a little daft sometimes), the vast majority of the people that know us, have been AMAZINGLY supportive. Though a few of our friends and family have, understandably, told us that we are crazy, and we wholeheartedly agree, most, if not all, of our friends and family have been very supportive and told us, "Well, if you think you can handle it....."
My reply to them has always been, "Oh, I have FAR surpassed what I ever THOUGHT I could do, a long time ago".

I will be honest though, if someone would have told me ahead of time, these are difficulties that you will go through in raising these 11 children, I may have said said no, and passed on this incredible opportunity. First off because, well... I can be selfish. I was thinking mostly of myself and "MY Plan" at the time. But also because I could not have possibly comprehended the love I would have for these children and the joy that I would experience in raising them. If I would have said no, I would have missed a lot of heartache, yes, but I would have missed out on the best part of what my life was meant to be; what OUR life was meant to be. I would have missed out on SO SO MANY incredible, wonderful, AMAZING life defining moments! It has far surpassed any incredible vacation I could have taken, any expensive object I could have ever owned, or any time I could have called my own.

It was one step at a time that I got to know these amazing kids and grow with them, as well as learn some pretty important life lessons through some pretty difficult things. I didn't know that they were capable of coming through such difficult pasts. I didn't know that I was capable of coming through such difficult obstacles. And though there are many moments when I DO fail, there are so many more moments when we all succeed. And I see maybe just a gimps of the amazing things that God has planned for me and all of our amazing little "village".

One day, when I was having a particularly difficult day, and feeling like a big fat failure, my amazing husband gently pointed out to me that God trusted me SO much that he gave me (at the time) EIGHT of his precious children to raise. Most of them with special needs. God knew what I could do with them that no one else could do. God chose ME to be their Mommy. I am really trying to embrace his inspired words. I am trying to embrace what we are doing here, raising 11 AMAZING individuals. And that I guess is where THIS story begins.