Our Adoption Story

As a couple, we always knew that adoption would be a way that we would grow our family. From the time I was a little girl I wanted to adopt. We were married for about 8 years before ‘baby fever’ hit. We were living in New Orleans and leading busy young professional lives, Robert working long hours and I was commuting 3 hours a day to LSU to finish my graduate degree. So rather than try to have a child we decided to adopt first. In Dec. 2004 our dossier was sent to China and we were matched with our daughter Avery, in June of 2005 (things moved a lot faster in the China adoption world back then).


The trip to China opened our eyes to the need of orphans around the world and changed us profoundly. When leaving China on our flight back to the US, we knew we would be back. We submitted a dossier in July 2006 to adopt another child. The wait to adopt a healthy girl from China had grown considerably by this time. After a year of waiting we really wanted to grow our family and so we started looking into other adoption programs. Nothing seemed to work or fit for our family. We decided we would try to have a child while we researched additional countries that had adoption programs.

In January of 2008 we found out we were pregnant and our son, Walker, was born in October of 2008. All the while we were in line to adopt a healthy infant girl form China. As we entered the Fall of 2009 we began to seriously consider adopting a child with a correctable special need from China. These children are typically available to be adopted on a quicker timeline than the healthy infant program. One Sunday in October right after Walker turned 1 we decided to fill out the special needs application. So we asked to be matched with a girl between the ages of 2 and 4 and selected a few correctable conditions we thought we could manage. We set in to wait for what we thought would likely be 6-9 months for a referral.

Well, 48 hours later we got a call from our agency. They had just received a new batch of referrals and had a file for a 4 year old girl with a repaired cleft lip. We were in shock and totally excited! Alexandra’s birthday is August 31, 2005. She was born the day we returned from China to the US with our daughter Avery. The exact day my husband looked at me on an airplane half a world away and said, “we’ll be back!” God’s timing is amazing!