Welcome to our new blog! You may know us from our other blog
The Handmade Dress, but in case you don't.... we are the Caffee family, Ben and Samantha and our three children Molly (7 yrs old), Timothy (5 yrs old), and Madeline (3yrs old). Ben is a firefighter/paramedic, the oldest of twelve children, part time farmer, and the best dad in the world. I'm a stay-at-home, homeschooling mama who loves to sew, crochet, bake bread and go on adventures with my children and husband. We are starting this blog to journal our adoption journey. We will be writing here along the way telling our story of how God is handmaking our family through adoption.
Like every adoption story ours began long ago, back when we could have never imagined ending up here....I'll tell it from the beginning: Ben and I have always loved children and were delighted when we found out six months into our marriage that our first baby was on her way. Ben was driving an ambulance then and I was working as a nurse at The Children's Hospital in Birmingham, Al. Early on in the pregnancy I started having trouble, I was in preterm labor by my sixth month, and eventually needed to be on strict bed rest with a medicine pump (brethine) pumping medicine into me constantly to keep me pregnant. The doctors told us that for every day we could keep our baby in the womb, that would be several days she wouldn't need to be in the NICU. I delivered our little miracle at 35 weeks (5 weeks early), 7 weeks later than the doctors predicted! To our surprise she was a whopping 6 lbs and 11 oz and just as healthy as she could be! That's when my days as a stay at home mama began, I was in love! For the first time in my life I knew my place, Mama. I was the Mama and loving every second!
We fought through two more hard pregnancies and one stay in the NICU over the next four years, it was hard but it was worth it. God had given us a desire for a big family from the moment our relationship began. Children are such a big part of our lives that we would fight through anything for them, so the pregnancies didn't really seem that bad.
When our youngest, Maddie, was one year old we found out we were expecting our fourth child! By then we had the bad pregnancy thing down, so we thought, we would just go into survival-mode for a few months and at the end we would have a beautiful baby to show for it. But God had other plans. At 11 weeks we found out that our baby had died. We were devastated. We expected to be pregnant again soon but it didn't happen. Eighteen months later we found out we had been given another chance, we just knew it would work this time, but from the beginning my body wasn't taking the strain very well. Just days from my second trimester we found out that this baby had not survived either.
What followed was months of grieving, not only the loss of our children, but the loss of hope. We were grieving the loss of the big family that we had always dreamed of having. But as the old saying goes, God never closes a door without opening a window. A couple of months after our baby was due to be born Ben and I talked about adoption for the first time. The first time we talked it was a very casual "what if" type of conversation...but God had started to do his work, within days our hearts had been opened completely to adopting.
All of those sad, angry, bitter feelings that had plagued us for so long almost instantly melted away. The thought of bringing other children into our home who need to be loved and cherished was like a breath of fresh air. God promises to give us the desires of our heart, but with us, he
changed the desires of our heart! Finally we are seeing and understanding more of his plan for "Our Handmade Family". It may not be the traditional family we always
thought we would have, but it will be in His Will....Just Perfect.
From now on I will be adding to this story here on our new blog. One day when God has led our children to us we will be able to look back and read this, our tale, of how God handmade our family......
