Meet Our Son! \\ Domestic Adoption Journey

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. So I have a very sweet, sleepy little surprise right here. If you guys are not subscribed to our vlog channel, then you probably have not seen the news. We've been sharing everything over there for the last week, but we had a surprise sort of stork drop last minute match. This was now, he's 11 days old now. So I'm just gonna share with you guys the story of kind of just quickly what happened. If you wanna see like the actual videos, because we did vlogs and shared kind of the whole journey. So I will leave those linked down below. We did that over on our vlog channel, but today I just wanted to do kind of like a formal introduction and share him with you. I will pick him up and show him to you, but he is happily sleeping right now. So I'm gonna let him do his thing. So before he just started randomly appearing in videos and you met our eighth child, that way I figured I would just sit down and introduce him to you and share with you guys quickly kind of how everything happened, because so many of you have been following along this whole time and you've all been so loving and supportive and I just wanted to kind of share with you the story, the sort of condensed version of the story and introduce him to you formally. So this sweet little baby here is Benjamin Arkeem. He was born on September 8th and he is absolutely just the sweetest, most easygoing baby. So on Sunday morning, we woke up to an email in our inbox from our adoption consultant saying, hey, got a last minute situation. Baby's probably gonna be born today. Mom wants to make an adoption plan. Are you interested in showing your profile? And so I woke up at like 5.30 that morning, saw the email, woke up Christopher, we got our coffee, we came downstairs and we sat down just to like talk through everything, pray through everything and decide if we wanted to say yes or no. And we had to give our answer by 8 a.m. because they were gonna be showing his birth mom profile books that morning. After talking it over and praying about it and everything, we decided that yes, this was sort of, we felt like an open door that God was asking us to walk through and on all the signs were kind of indicating that this might be a really good match for us. You know, we figured again, let's just put it in God's hands. Like I've said a million times with a family our size, we knew it was gonna take a really special mom to pick us. So yeah, so we just thought, okay, let's just put our yes on the table. Doesn't even mean that she'll pick us, let's just put our yes on the table. And so we sent that off at like 7.30 in the morning and then I tried to just carry about my day but it was a little bit difficult. And then that afternoon at around two o'clock, I got a phone call from our adoption consultant and she was like, you guys are picked, she chose you guys. She loved you guys. And I was just, and at that point, at that time we found out that he was a boy. We didn't know previously, but we found out at that time that he was a boy. And so we were so excited and I just felt like, again, I felt a little guarded just because of everything that happened last time with our previous adoption match that just didn't end up working out. So I felt like I was a little guarded but I tried really hard to like let that guard down. So basically they told us that because of the state that he was born in has a revocation period after signing. So the way that signings work is every state, every single state is different. Some states expecting moms or birth moms can sign after 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours. And when they sign, it's irrevocable. In his state, she could sign after 24 hours but she had four days to revoke. So that's a little different. So we ended up finding out the next morning that she did sign, but she still had four days where she could revoke. And so initially they told us that they thought, let's just put him in cradle care and you guys can come down after the four day period is up. And that way, you don't have to risk the heartbreak of coming down here and then having her change her mind. And then you have to give the baby back. And that's always been like my worst nightmare. Just to be honest, one of my prayers throughout all of our adoption processes has been that the Lord would not let me hold a baby and then have that baby be returned. I always prayed that if we were matched that if the expecting mom felt like adoption wasn't right that she would hopefully come to that decision before the baby was born. That's just always been my selfish prayer. So I hung up and I was like, yeah, that makes sense. And about 10 minutes after hanging up, I was like, of course that makes sense. But my heart is telling me that's not the right thing to do. And I was kind of like, oh geez, here we go. But I just, knowing everything that I know about trauma and how it affects the brain, and I've talked about this many times, but people often assume that if you adopt a baby as an infant, that they won't experience the same kind of trauma. And it's simply not true. The way that trauma affects the brain, even for an infant, can absolutely have a lasting effect for them. And so what we knew was that if he left his mother's womb and then went into the newborn nursery and was cared for there by someone else, and then went to cradle care and was cared for by someone else, and then to us, it felt like a lot of broken attachments for him in the first week of life. And so we just felt like, you know, if we can sort of put ourselves at risk and be the ones to go down there, the only people who are gonna lose in that scenario would be us. And so we felt like, you know what? We would rather him attach to us. And if everything goes great, then great. He hasn't had a lot of broken attachments. If not, then he's going back to his birth mom and that's a wonderful thing. And so we just felt like we would rather put ourselves in that place than have this tiny baby bear the brunt of that. So we called back the agency and said, listen, I know that you guys recommend this, but if we promise you, we know wholeheartedly what we're getting into. And if she chooses to, you know, change her mind and revoke, we will bring him back. And, you know, we understand basically what we're putting ourselves into. And they were like, okay, if you guys understand and know the risks, then that's fine. Go ahead and come on down. And so it's just crazy how like the one thing that I prayed that God wouldn't do is the very place that he asked me to put myself by choice. And obviously it worked out in the end for us, but it could have not. And I went down there knowing that. And I don't know, it's just crazy how I feel like sometimes God stretches us and asks us to do things that we are terrified of, but we know he's asking us to do it. So anyways, I'm not gonna cry in this video. So we went down there on Tuesday and we took placement of him on Tuesday. And we basically just kind of stayed in our hotel for the next few days. We did not tell our children what was going on. We told them we had a business trip. We didn't want them to get their hopes up and then have their little hearts broken. It's hard for kids. They don't understand as much as you try to explain it. It's hard for them. So we decided let's just not tell them. And then if it doesn't work out, then they're none the wiser. And if it does, we'll have this epic surprise of like, here's your baby brother. So that's just what we decided to do. So we spent those few days just kind of laying around in our hotel room, eating a ton of food, way too much food. He had doctor's appointments and we had some meetings at the adoption agency to fill out paperwork and stuff. Tried to keep ourselves busy, but it was definitely a long four days. And then on the last day, we moved from our hotel to a rental house and that's where the kids were gonna be coming down. So my mom brought them down and told them that they were just coming to meet us for like a little family vacation. And so that Friday arrived, five o'clock, got the call from our adoption agency saying, congratulations, he's yours. The revocation period is up. And man, it was, you guys can go back and watch the videos if you wanna see all of that. So my mom ended up getting to the house like 20 minutes before five o'clock and I just could not, I couldn't stomach the idea of even sharing him with them one minute before I knew for sure. And so I left with him, I put him in the car and my mom got there with the kids and Sierra told them that I had gone to the grocery store to get some stuff for dinner. So then when I came home, they were all just sitting on the couch waiting and I opened the door and walked in with the baby and they just like lost it. They were so excited. It was such a good surprise for them. I've said this before with adoption, there's so much heartache and brokenness and sadness that you really do have to take the opportunities to really celebrate when you can. And so because with situations like this in adoption, you don't get the whole nine months of pregnancy and then birth and everything, it's just everyone's just excited for you. The whole process is just joy and excitement. While there is joy and excitement, there's also a lot of loss and heartache involved in it. And in order for us to gain a child, another woman is losing her child. And so I just felt like let's take this opportunity after this really heavy week to just have something really exciting and fun happen and it was exactly what we all needed. So then we spent the next few days just waiting for our clearances. So once you, when you adopt in between two different states, you have to get clearances from both states to kind of move the baby across state lines basically. So we had to wait for that. And so we just soaked up some time together as a family. We were at kind of like this beach getaway type house. It was really beautiful, really nice. And we just took that opportunity. We laid around, we watched a lot of TV, we ate a lot of ice cream. We ordered like takeout seafood like every night. We had a ton of shrimp and really good food. Kind of laid around like slugs and snuggled a baby. And it was just, I hadn't seen the kids all week so it was really nice. The twins were so excited and we could just sit on the couch and snuggle with everybody. And it was just a nice kind of quiet family week. We didn't really vlog much at all there or take a lot of video. Sorry, there is a fly. We just soaked that time up together. And so then on Tuesday we came home and now here we are. So this little guy is doing so well. He's such a sweet baby. He's such an easy baby. The only time he gets really fussy is if he has a lot of gas. He doesn't like to have, oh my gosh, stop it. He doesn't like to have a poopy diaper. And he doesn't like to be hungry. I feel like these are things I can understand. And so he's just, you know, he just doesn't fuss for the sake of fussing. So he's a pretty calm, easy baby. And he does wake up every two hours on the dot to eat. He eats a ton. He loves to eat. Loves to eat. He has a latch like nobody's business. And he just loves to eat. So I have this feeling that he's gonna be one of my chunkier babies. I'm trying to think who was my chunkiest baby. I think Shelby was my chunkiest baby, but I think he might rival her. I feel like he's gonna kinda get big fast. When we took him to his doctor's appointment, just a few days after he was born, he was already over his birth weight. I don't know if they weighed him wrong at the hospital. It's very uncommon for babies to be over their birth weight that quickly, but he was. So he's doing fantastic. He's very healthy. And he's just the sweetest, most precious baby. And we are all in love with him. I think I already told you his name is Benjamin Arkeem. And we named him with the help of his birth mom. And so that's really special to us. We've always given our kids family names as middle names. And having her choose his middle name was to us the same thing, and that's a family name. She's part of our family, he's part of our family now. And so that was just something that was really special for us to be able to have both of his families be a part of naming him. And so yeah, we've been calling him Benji or Benny. Who knows, you guys, if you've been around any amount of time, you know that we have some weird nicknames for our kids. They're usually derived from something very random that we start calling them. Ivy's nickname is Chi-Chi. And Amelia gets called Millie-Jo, Millie, Boo-Boo, Buddy. She gets called all kinds of things. Mostly Boo-Boo and Chi-Chi are what they get called. And that's Amelia and Ivy. So I don't know what Benjamin is going to be. But like I said, the boys started calling him Benji. And we've also been calling him Benny. So we shall see what he ends up sticking with for a name. I also just want to say a huge thank you to you guys. This adoption journey has been short, much shorter than we expected, but it's also been very intense and like full speed ahead the whole time. It's been kind of crazy. And it's been definitely different to share it online publicly in real time. Even with Rosie's adoption is the only other adoption that we've ever shared online. We weren't even making videos when we adopted our other children and when we had our other children. So, and even that one, we didn't really share much about that adoption until after she was home. So doing this all kind of on the upfront side of things has been definitely a very different experience. But what we really wanted to do and the reason that we did it is because we wanted to share with everybody the realities of adoption, some of the hard truths, because I think sometimes it's easy to see the gotcha day videos, the adoption day videos, and we're all crying watching those and they're so beautiful, but there's so much, so much that goes into that one day. And I just don't feel like the, I hate to like harp on this, but I just feel like the loss and the sad part of adoption doesn't get talked about enough. And so it makes it almost like people forget that there's a loss involved and we only see and get excited about the new baby, but we're often forgetting first families, birth families, things like that. So it's definitely a fine line because you guys know if you've watched our channels for any amount of time, for privacy reasons for our children and for their birth families, we don't share anything about their birth families specifically. We don't share anything about their specific stories. We believe that those are their stories and they can share them in if and when they ever want to. It's not ours. We always just share our journey to get to them, but yeah, so we hoped in sharing this time that hopefully we could just kind of help bring a little bit more awareness to the whole triad of adoption, that adoption isn't just about the adoptive family or the adoptive child or the birth family that adoption is truly this triad of all three parties involved and all three parties matter and all three parties should have a voice. And so that's just what we really hope to share. So I'm not gonna lie. I'm kind of really tired. It's definitely been kind of one of those like crazy things having a newborn again and not really getting much sleep. I'm trying to kind of jump back into getting some work stuff done because obviously this was a last minute sort of situation. And so I have like other obligations and things that I have to like get done and jump back into. So just trying to get all that stuff done. So yeah, that is it for today's video, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm very excited to introduce you to our son. And so yeah, that's it for today's video, guys. Thank you so much for watching. And again, thank you just for being a part of this community and being the wonderful and supportive community that you are. We love you guys so much and I will see you guys again very soon. Bye.