I think this year was by far the fastest of my 30 years.

Here is The Year 2011…

I typically try to sum up each month in a few words, however, this year is worthy of many words.

January

December 13th, 2010, we received a call from our lawyer saying Tracy was pregnant again and if we wanted another baby, she wanted to place with us again. We were not planning to start the adoption process for a second child until Little Bug was at least two, but of course we said we wanted this baby.

On Christmas Day we surprised our family by giving them this picture:

It said, “Mama’s not pregnant, but someone else is! July 2011”. Everyone was elated that we would be welcoming another baby into the family come summer.

On January 22nd, we saw Tracy for the first time since she placed Little Bug with us 20 months ago. We went to the zoo and had a fabulous time together. I got pictures of Little Bug with her birth mother which I had always wanted.

Then, things started getting “fishy” and on January 31st we learned that Tracy had either miscarried or had not been pregnant after all and, just as quickly as we thought we were going to be welcoming another baby, we lay those thoughts to rest and reverted back to our original plan for a second baby: starting the process after Little Bug’s 2nd birthday.

February

February was spent recovering from the whirlwind of December and January!

March

March 8th, I received a text message from my friend, Jennifer. Her lawyer had a potential adoption situation and Jennifer wondered if we would be interested.

After thinking and praying on it for a night, we figured we might as well look into this. We figured God had opened this door and we trusted Him to guide us to whatever His plan was to add another child to our family.

We updated our family profile to give to the lawyer, Susan, and also learned Jennifer had told another one of her friends, Rebecca, about this same situation.

Rebecca found me on Facebook and sent me a message. It was the very beginning of a very odd start to a very true and genuine forever friendship that would develop over the course of the next few months. Rebecca and I started communicating through Facebook messages and chat while we both waited to hear if we would be chosen to parent this baby!

April

The wait continued. My friendship with Rebecca continued to grow. We both knew that one of us might be picked over the other and we were totally okay with that. We knew God had a plan for this baby and we simply waited to see that plan unfold.

April 20th, we learned the birth mother had decided she was not going to work with Susan anymore.

And, that was the end of that … or so we thought!

May

This was the month Little Bug turned two. May 2nd I called my lawyer, Emily, (the lawyer who did Little Bug’s adoption) and I told her we were ready to start the adoption process for another baby. She starts telling me about a birth mother who had just contacted her in the past week or so. The situation sounds strangely familiar to the one that we were waiting to hear about with Susan.

May 3rd, during a phone conference with Emily, and as she is sharing more details about this situation, she tells me something that makes me feel 99.9% sure this is the same woman that Susan had been working with only weeks prior!

Emily takes our family profile to this woman on May 12th and then calls us around noon that day to tell us we have officially been matched with Melody!

Two days later, I met Rebecca for the first time, who was over the moon excited about the orchestration of God’s miracle to match us with Melody.

June

We were not certain when this baby’s due date was. We had been told June 8th (by Susan) and either July 8th or August 8th (by Emily). Towards the middle of June Emily got access to all the medical records and we learned the official due date was August 8th.

I was pretty bummed about this because 1) the longer the wait in an adoption process, the higher chance of having to deal with some drama and 2) the longer the wait, the longer you have to live with the uncertainty of wondering if the adoption plan will happen or if it will fail.

We also got confirmation that this was indeed the woman who had been working with Susan!

July

God taught me SO MUCH about waiting during this adoption process.

How we were match with Melody was nothing short of a complete miraculous orchestration that only GOD could have performed. Obviously, I wasn’t in control – AT ALL. God orchestrated the events that brought us to Melody via two lawyers and a most unusual friendship with Rebecca!

Speaking of Rebecca: Things were pretty exciting for her this month, too! Rebecca and Luke decided they were going to put their names with my lawyer, Emily, too. They had their first phone conference with Emily on July 18th. The very next day, Emily called them back asking if they were interested in adopting a baby boy that had been born 6 weeks early the night before! July 20th – yes, just TWO days after their first phone conference with Emily – they were headed to [the state I live in] to meet their son!!! Rebecca stayed with my parents for four weeks and 1 day while she waited for Levi to be released from the hospital.

August

Sweet Pea was born on August 2nd!!

Two days later the TPR was signed and we drove the 1.5 hours to go meet our newest baby girl.

I will never forget this moment as long as I live:

I had always wondered how my heart could love another baby, but in this moment I knew how: It just happens.

Sweet Pea spent nine days in the NICU and then was discharged on August 11th.

Levi, Rebecca’s baby boy, was discharged from the NICU on August 16th! Before Rebecca headed home we got a picture of us with our miracle babies, born 15 days apart.

Who would have ever thought this was God’s plan??

In the NICU we discovered that Sweet Pea has a very sensitive stomach. The month of August was challenging as we tried to figure out what would best help Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea was also hospitalized for 3 days due to bacteria found in her blood sample which turned out to be just a contaminant.

September

Survival mode continues. I got through this month with the support of Dave and my mom who was constantly lending her helping hand. We took Sweet Pea to a GI specialist where we learned her issues are from the drug exposure in the womb and her digestive system just needs time to grow and mature.

We learned how to best manage her pain and discomfort and, by the end of the month, we were just beginning to come out of survival mode.

October

We definitely turned a corner this month. We had to tweak Sweet Pea’s Zantac dosage and get the tummy troubles under control again, but this month, life seemed to be back to normal. Well, a new normal with two little girls.

November

Sweet Pea’s adoption was finalized on November 9th! That day signified the end of our journey to #2. It was a journey that began sooner than we planned, with twists and turns along the way. But as was our journey to Little Bug, this journey was weaved together with the thread of God’s faithfulness in a display for the world to see another one of His miracles.

November 9th we celebrated all God DID to bring our precious second daughter into our lives. We stood amazed once again at the events that took place over the past year and we gave thanks and praised God for his loving kindness to us.

December

And here we are again at December 31st – the last day of 2011. It literally seems like it was just last week that I was sitting at the table eating lunch with Little Bug, who was just 18 months old, and my cell phone rang catapulting us right then and there on to our journey to #2.

It is amazing to think that Emily called about a baby that maybe never was, however, there was a tiny baby tucked away in the womb of a woman we would never meet but who would birth our second baby just 8 months later.

I think about last Christmas and how very special that Christmas was. I had always wanted to make a Christmas “pregnancy announcement”. Even in Tracy’s deceit, God made good come from it. We announced our 2nd baby would be born in July and she almost was. She missed being born in July by just two days.

The faithfulness of God just astounds me. My heart is so full of love for these two little girls, it is overwhelming to think about at times. I went from infertility treatments to mother to two beautiful daughters in just over two years.

As we enter 2012, I don’t know what this year will bring but I do know this:

God’s faithfulness will continue on.

Happy New Year!!!

- Elaine