Josh and I had the privilege this January to become licensed foster parents. This year has grown me in more ways then I can say. I have learned so much and I am so thankful for the amazing opportunity to be part of another child’s life. This week our family adopted the sweet little person we have been loving and caring for over the last six months.

Adopting our foster son has been an amazing and yet bittersweet experience. I have never felt such a deep loss for another person before. I think about and pray for our son’s biological parents, I pray for the future conversations we will have with our son regarding his adoption, and I pray for our family to be a safe and secure place for him to learn and know what love is, how much we love him, but more importantly how much God loves him.

We had the most amazing people from the Arizona Department of Child Safety advocating for our child. Words cannot fully express how honored our family has been to walk along side these individuals who will forever be part of our child’s story and we are so grateful for their diligent work. I would like to publicly thank these individuals who came into our child’s life because of tragic circumstances. I wanted to say so much more to you all at the adoption and express my deepest heartfelt appreciation for what you did for our son and the work that you do everyday for so many kids. My eyes are so blurred right now I can barely see the keys on the keyboard to type but I hope you know how much you mean to our family.

We have heard many similar responses from others when they learned we were going to be foster parents. Ranging from “I could never do that” to “You are a really wonderful person”. Josh and I would like everyone to know that we don’t think of ourselves as wonderful but we do think of ourselves as forgiven. We are grateful for the Lord and how he continues to gradually grow us more into the likeness of Christ and we are so glad that we made ourselves available for God to use our family.

The adoption of our son has been the opportunity to see something beautiful come from something broken. And in seeing this we can see how God views us, his children.

Our hope and prayer was to be able to bless another family by allowing them the opportunity and time to reunify with their child. While we are sadden that this wasn’t able to happen for our son we know that for him we are his best chance for a happy childhood. One that will be filled with love, joy, kindness, safety, and security. The blessing has been ours to enjoy and cherish and we will continue to do so as a forever family.

Out of respect for our children and their privacy Josh and I have chosen to not share pictures of them on social media or this website. If you have been a longtime reader of The Workout Mama you might have noticed a change over the last few years of what I have shared and I have also removed older posts for this reason. In light of the adoption of our son we are even more committed now to keep their faces off the internet for their privacy and safety. We are asking if we have shared details with you about our son to refrain from commenting online with any information that we have not shared publicly.

Over the next several weeks I will be sharing more posts on our foster care experience. While I will not be sharing details of our child’s story I do want to share what we have learned in hopes that it might encourage others to look into this ministry and also provide any resources that we have found useful. Feel free to leave any questions you have and I will try and answer them to the best of my ability in an upcoming post.

To the doctors, nurses, therapists, the court, our church, WIC, our foster care agency, the Arizona Department of Child Safety, and especially our friends and family thank you for supporting us and caring for our son.