Hello everyone! We are Greg and Melissa. We have been married for 20 years and have six children. When we started dating we were in high school, and the conversation of kids came up very quickly. We both loved kids, and of course, Melissa was planning our wedding shortly after we started dating and naming our future children. 😉 Don’t all girls do that??!! Anyway ….. after we got married we decided we wanted to start a family right away. Little did we know what a journey that would take us on. We had unexplained infertility and were told that we would likely never have biological children. We got this news after five years of trying to start our family. We were devastated, but always knew our family would also be built through adoption. We started the process to adopt a baby from Russia and were close to a referral when we found out that Melissa was pregnant! We were in shock. Our son, Noah, was born in 2004. When Noah was 6 months old we got another surprise – Melissa was pregnant with our son, Logan. When Logan was 8 months old we started the process to adopt a baby from South Korea. On Christmas Eve 2007 we arrived home with our little girl. We thought our family was complete at this point, but in 2012 we found ourselves pregnant (huge surprise) and at 15 weeks, we were told that our baby did not have a heartbeat anymore. Melissa’s body continued to think it was pregnant for several more weeks, and the loss was devastating to our family. We decided then that God was telling us something. He knew what our hearts knew — our family was not complete. In 2013 our son Brody was born, He has been a spit fire since he was born and keeps us all on our toes! In 2017 we felt an overwhelming desire from God to adopt. We started the process to adopt a baby girl, and in February of 2018 a precious expectant Mama chose our family to adopt her baby BOY! Yep, we were shocked! We knew this child was meant for our family — God does not make mistakes, and His plans are always better than ours. We said YES! and in June we welcomed our fourth little boy into our family. He is the light of our life and we cannot imagine life without this precious boy. Our story doesn’t end here ….
…. in 2019 we were contacted by our little boy’s birth mom and she said she was pregnant and wanted to place her baby with us. We rushed to get our background checks done, our medical evaluations, drug tests, home study – all of that! We were able to complete everything in record time. In August of 2019 baby girl was born, and mama decided to parent. While our hearts were sad, we were so thrilled that she was able to make this decision to do what was best for herself and her baby. We knew deep down that this was God’s way of speaking to us that our family was still not complete. In November of 2019 we were chosen by another beautiful woman to adopt her baby girl. On January 30th baby girl made her entrance into the world – a little over 2 weeks early! She is beautiful and we could not feel more blessed, humbled and complete!
We are grateful to have been chosen to be one of the featured families with Wanderlust and Mayhem. As you can imagine, two adoptions in a very short amount of time is VERY hard financially. Both of these adoptions were very expansive and we have had to take out loans and put a lot of the fees on credit cards. We know God is faithful, and these children are worth every single sacrifice. We are humbled to know that these bows will help us pay off our adoption debt.
So much love and gratitude from our family to yours.
Well, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but Steve and I are have talked about adopting again…talking to the “L” family sure does make me think about it more!
