Our 8 Year Journey - Ben & Elisa

We are Ben and Elisa and the following posts will hopefully give you hope and comfort as you trust in God’s direction in your life and navigate the waters of adoption. 

Before I begin, I need to throw out a huge thank you to Abba Canada for their support. Having children has been a big financial load (but we would do it all over again) and receiving the grant helped us complete our final leg when we didn’t know where the money was going to come from. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Our prayer is that Abba Canada will be able to continue doing what they do for a very long time.

Our journey began……

It all started with the battle of infertility issues. Issues that kept us from what we thought would be a normal family. Boy were we wrong. Our hearts longed to be parents and with each month passing, the hurt and pain grew bigger. After a year of this battle, we finally were sent to the fertility doctor. Our only path to biological children would be through invitro. This was not what we had planned. The financial cost, emotional tolls, the medications and then the procedure was a massive weight on our shoulders. We had strong convictions that we would only fertilize the eggs we were going to use. We were not interested in freezing. Even in the transfer room, they tried convincing us otherwise. We knew that if God wanted us to get pregnant, we needed to follow our hearts. 

1st time, pregnant with twins. Our hearts overjoyed. I must admit, I was a little concerned about “twins”.  Two of everything was not what I had intended. We both knew the risks of multiples when we started, ultimately, we were ready for these wonderful gifts. What came around the 20-week mark forever remains heart ache that will never go away. The short story… Elisa went into pre-term labour and delivered a little boy and little girl on a cold December 4th. Elisa had not been seen by a doctor for over 24 hours of her arrival. When a doctor finally came, it was too late. She was too far into labour to stop it. She delivered a little boy and a little girl. Both cried when they were delivered. They didn’t make it.

We did two more rounds of invitro, both times getting pregnant….. Ultimately ending in miscarriage. We were done. We could not handle the pain and stress of this journey. 

This is where our wonderful adoption story starts. From the very beginning of our relationship, we talked and longed to adopt. Since I was a little kid, I wanted to adopt.

We reached out to an adoption agency, started our Pride Training through our local Children’s Services and headed with our documentation to Ethiopia. During this process, our social worker asked to keep our file to show possible birth mothers for private adoptions. We agreed to do this until our file was ready to be sent over. 

The beginning of May 2006, our file was ready to go. We needed to go and sign off on the documents.  Prior to us heading to do so, I got a phone call from our social worker. It was a sunny Thursday morning and I was driving. My phone rang and I saw it was our social worker. I just assumed that it was regarding our file to be sent to Ethiopia. I was in shock. What she said, I never could have imagined that it was going to happen. Elisa and I had been selected by a birth mother of a boy who was born at the end of April. I was overflowing with emotion. I couldn’t even respond to her. That afternoon, we got to meet our precious little boy and one week to the day, he came home. He would have been home that day, but because our wonderful government had only approved us for international adoption and not domestic adoption, we had to re-apply…. Also re-pay the fee. However, they were nice enough to expedite it because he was sitting in a foster home. We were now parents. We had nothing to offer a baby but love, food and a roof over his head. After all, we were adopting from Ethiopia and had lots of time to gather clothes, strollers and cribs. Through our wonderful church, family and friends, within the week, we had everything we needed.

Our infertility doctor had wanted us to try one more time. We did. We started the processes when our son was almost 1 and got pregnant. This time, Elisa had been followed by a high-risk OB. Again, there were complications that had Elisa hospitalized and she gave birth to a little boy at 30 weeks. Our youngest was very excited to have a little brother. After his lengthy stay in the hospital, we got to go home as a family of 4.

Fast forward a year and we start the process of adoption. This time, we were going to Columbia. We were with Columbia for 2.5 years before it was shut down. That stung. We lost out on a lot of money because of our agency at the time. But we still felt God’s calling to continue. We talked openly with our boys about the process and what happened, and they insisted we continue. That was when we found a new agency. We switched to Guyana. It seemed to be a new and stable program. Things seemed to be moving a little slower than we hoped but then we hit a wall and things stopped. A family was stuck there for months.  Something we could not do. Over 2 years in that program and now to face the decision to continue or be done. After all, we were good with our family of 4. But, our boys wanted a sister, we wanted a daughter and felt God still calling us to continue. So, we met with our agency and decided to make the switch to India.  This was it. We were done after this, if it wasn’t going to work…………..

8 years ago, we started on a journey to adopt. At the time, we had two wonderful little boys, 3 and 1 and had a longing for a 3rd. We felt God’s leading from day one. Our journey has not been easy, or short for that matter. Most people would have pulled out years ago, but ultimately, Gods leading, the boys wanting a little sister and mom and dad wanting a little pink around the house, we kept the path. 

Fast forward 8 years, 3 countries and a bunch of “should we be doing this?”, an 11 and an 8-year-old, we have pink flooding the house. We were matched with a little girl from India on August 1st, 2018. She was born on February 25th of that year.