by Lynn Sinclair

Created on: May 10, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I will never forget Mother's day of 2001. My grandmother, who raised me and my brother and sister, had died just a couple of months before, suddenly, from a massive heart attack. We were still trying to have a baby with no success and I was becoming more and more disheartened with each and every month of trying. I clearly remember sitting in church on that Sunday feeling particularly down in the dumps. The pastor of the church we were attending was doing the typical Mother's day type stuff, asking the oldest mother to stand, the youngest mother to stand....the newest mother to stand....anyone expecting to stand...all the mothers to stand....then he got "creative" and said for anyone that was going to spend time with their mother that day to stand....and before you knew it, it seemed I was the only person in the church still sitting. I remember fighting back tears, unsuccessfully and feeling like I just wanted to crawl in a hole somewhere....I felt like God had abandoned me and that my desire to have children was one prayer He was saying NO to. I remember that day as being one of the lowest in my life.

God was there, he made that day stand out in my memory so that I would also never forget the next Mother's day that was coming.

Very soon after that day while on an evening walk around our neighborhood, we happened to speak to a neighbor that we did not know down the street from our house. He was outside with his young daughter. We commented on how cute she was and a conversation began. He happened to ask if we had children and we told him no but we had been trying for a while. He shared that he and his wife had tried for over 15 years and had given up and decided they weren't meant to have kids. Then they had met a friend of a friend who was expecting and had asked them if they would consider adopting her baby. They were thrilled. She was at that time 4 years old and the light of their lives. He asked if we had considered adoption and we said we had but we were thinking to have one or two biological children and then maybe adopting our third child. He said that it was funny that we should run into him then because he had a co-worker who's sister was expecting a baby that she could not afford to parent. She already had two children and was a single mother and she just could not take care of another child. We agreed to meet with her and things did not work out but the door was then open to pursue adoption.

In September of that year, our actual first meeting was scheduled

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