“Love, not blood, makes a family.”  Love made my family, each piece.  When I met my husband 15 years ago, love helped us build our strong foundation.  Love gave us our two beautiful daughters and just over 5 years ago love carried us through adoption and gave us our son. 

 

From the beginning of our marriage we knew two things, we wanted a strong business and an even stronger family.  We started on family business dreams right away, and joined my father-in-law in a homebuilding business.  My husband and I successfully worked together to help give others their dream homes.  We walked clients through the homebuilding process from a parcel of land to interior design, watching them build their dream.  Each home we built, we knew we were in the right business.  I decided that I wanted to pursue another aspect of the real-estate market, I wanted to become an agent.  As I worked through my classes and gained my license, I saw a different aspect of the market.  This offered me new insights on the home buying process for families.  Each house that I sold or watched families buy, fulfilled my inner passion to help others achieve the dreams that they chased.

 

As our family business and careers grew, we knew we wanted our family to grow alongside.  After several failed attempts and our hearts broken with infertility, we turned to adoption.  In 2012, we anxiously filled out our paperwork, connected with an agency, and worked through all of the steps to adopt.  The road to adoption was unknown to us and at times it seemed so long.  One very snowy day, we drove to fax our final paperwork and we sat back to wait.   We went about our lives, trying to not think about the process that was now out of our hands.

 

Just a few weeks later, a few days after Christmas, we received a call.  A young woman in Florida had picked out our profile.  Over our budget we had some things to think about.  Hours later they called back, she’s in labor, we knew this was our baby.  We hurried to pack the car, driving through the night to the nearest airport with flights to Florida.  Early the next morning we flew to Florida.  We landed for a connecting flight in Atlanta, as I turned on my phone looking for an update, a brand-new, naked baby appeared, he was here!  No amount of patience or distraction could keep us away from that hospital.  A few very long hours later my son was finally placed into my arms. Very few words can describe the moments that followed, we spent days just watching him, amazed. 

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In the 5 years since, those moments still seem so fresh.  We now have an intelligent, spunky, rambunctious 5-year-old.  He was brought to us through adoption, he doesn’t look like us, he doesn’t have our blood, but he is ours through love.