Our Story

    

We had our first date in high school and have been together ever since!  Married in 2002, we tried unsuccessfully for years to conceive.  To top that off, the doctors had no answers for our infertility, it was simply diagnosed as "unexplained".  We began feeling pulled more and more towards adoption during the winter of 2007 and almost immediately began investigating agencies.  It wasn't long before we decided that Children's Hope International [based out of St. Louis, MO] was the agency for us. 
     We joined the CHI family in May '07 after deciding to adopt from Vietnam. It had one of the shortest waits and was much easier to qualify for as opposed to some of the other programs, namely China. China, at the time, had one of the shortest waits for an infant girl but was also one of the harder programs to qualify for. We blazed through our home study and had our CIS fingerprinting done and back within 2 weeks! We were placed on the waiting list in Oct. of '07 and that's where we remained until May '08.  We received word that the Vietnam program was about to enter a moratorium that could last for quite sometime [as of Feb, 2010, the program is still closed] and decided to pull the plug on that program. While searching through the other programs available through CHI, one country stood above the rest: ETHIOPIA!!!  We had expressed interest in this program at the beginning of our journey but unfortunately, the Ethiopia program wasn't available when we first joined Children's Hope.  We officially hit the Ethiopian wait list on August 29, 2008 and received our referral for a 2 month old, beautiful baby girl on November 16, 2009!!! 
     So, here we are, about to embark on the best years of our lives.  Words cannot truely express just how excited we are to meet our little girl.  We've never met and we already love her so much!  We cannot wait to bring Marley home...