It's a BOY

We are at 20 weeks now! AND, it's a BOY!!! Wow, a boy. I was able to go with our birthmom to the ultrasound and saw it loud and clear - a boy. Tony is so excited! We are half way there, too. 20 out of 40 weeks. This is so exciting; now we are in preparation mode. I'm not quite sure what to do with myself...there is so much to do, it's a challenge to focus on it. I am getting things together to start preparing to breastfeed and am very excited about that :). Dr. Jack Newman of Toronto is a huge help. His website http://www.drjacknewman.com/ is great as he is the forerunner/expert in the field. I am looking forward to the bonding experience and am grateful there is a chance of providing at least most of the breastmilk for the baby!

Here's a picture of the little guy.

Isn't it amazing?

With love and hope,

Tamara and Tony

Expecting

We feel as if we are "expecting" and I guess we really are!!! Of course, I'm not pregnant, but our birthmom is and due June 19! It is just so incredibly exciting. Nine years ago tomorrow, we got engaged to be married and 5 short months later we were married on June 21...this feels so similar. In only 5 short months from now, we will bring our baby home. We just cannot express how incredibly grateful we are to God for blessing us with the hope and faith that He has given us. It is amazing to believe that soon we will be parents. We've already started some preparations, of course, and continue to do so - this is the "oh my gosh there is so much to do" stage, I guess! Wow :)

Thank you all for your continued support and prayers.
With love and hope,
Tamara and Tony

On the Receiving Path!!

Happy New Year!!!
It has been since Thanksgiving that I have posted....wow how time flies! Sorry about that!
As some of you know, I have been creating art for a number of years now that depicts (although not always consciously) "baby" or "fetal" shapes, pregnant bellies, and images of that sort. Well, just before the last post, I had a dream of quilting them all together (there are 100's of them now) and creating "receiving blankets". Yes, RECEIVING blankets. I did quilt a few Touch Drawings together for the Touch Drawing show at our gallery which is coming down today. What amazes me is that we are now on what I refer to as the Receiving Path; we are ready and preparing not to "get pregnant" but to receive a baby. Wow!
It looks like it will be June when our baby arrives and we are so excited to be preparing for him or her!!!(We have chosen to not find out if the baby will be a girl or a boy - it really makes no difference :).

We are so deeply grateful to ALL OF YOU for your continued support and ask for your prayers and well wishes as we journey with the baby's birthmom through her pregnancy and the birth of baby. She is wonderful and we feel so blessed to know her and to be able to do this with her. What an amazing heart and beautiful woman! It is with GREAT joy that we announce that we are planning for the arrival of our baby on June 19!! That gives us almost 6 months to prepare. We'll try to keep you updated better.

Receiving such blessings is challenging, and yet I feel like God has prepared us to do so. The term "receiving blanket" is so appropriate because as a baby is born, the parents receive the baby - a divine gift to love, a sacred agreement to parent and protect, a treasured opportunity to grow and become. Due to all of the trials, disappointments, and subsequent learning we have had along with the tremendous support you all have given us - we are ready to receive such a blessing! Thank you! The gratitude is overflowing and the magnitude of this experience is humbling.

At this time, as we savor the recent Christmas blessings of family and time together and celebrate the upcoming New Year, we share our gratitude and hope with all of you - may your New Year be filled with abundant blessings!

With love and hope,
Tamara and Tony

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! We can hardly believe that so much time has passed since our last post. Today I awoke early with a heart full of gratitude. Today (and every day) we give thanks for the blessings we have received and are about to receive. We have been filled with gratitude for all of the prayers, love, and light we receive every day from all of you who are with us on this journey. We give thanks for the possibility of starting a family very soon. We give thanks for our beautiful home, our dear friends, our loving families, and jobs that provide us income to make our dream come true. The list goes on and on, really.

When I was growing up and starting to feel a little down or negative, my dad always reminded me to "make your gratitude list". It always worked! I have not been feeling down, but I realize that I am always making this list in my mind. I am thankful for all of the abundance in our lives; and for the roads we have traveled. It takes a lot to be able to say that because many have not been smooth and we have experienced great loss - but I am!

I reread some of the pages of a daily mandala journal that I made during the months that we were in the process of having a surrogate carry our child. I was taking hormones, she was taking hormones, she was far away and we knew it was probably our final effort to have a child that was biologically ours. We had lost two children already and I had almost died. This felt like our last chance. I made a drawing every day and then wrote about it. It was a way for me to be present in the process and to stay connected to what was happening when things sometimes felt so surreal. Reading through them recently, I saw the word "hope" over and over - on almost every page. It is no accident that we named our blog "hoping4baby". One of the paintings I did after a very disappointing loss is entitled "Window of Hope". Throughout all of the adversity in the past seven years, Tony and I both have remained hopeful that one day we will be a family. We decided that "hope" will part of our baby's name when he or she arrives because through our hope, our baby has been with us all this time.

We are thankful that God has always provided us with the hope we needed and we pray that soon our baby Hope will come to be with us and make us a family. We are grateful that our hope has already made us stronger. May God bless each of you with what you need and may you always live with hope in your heart.

With love and hope,
Tamara and Tony

Dream Big

Our pastor taught a lesson recently about "Dream Big". There was a time when our pain outweighed our dreams and now we know it really is important to dream and to believe- just like the Marianne Williamson quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Dreaming big allows us to invite and accept God's will and the miracles that are available. We pray for this miracle and hope, with active faith, that our baby will come to us soon. We believe this to be true and know that by doing this we are liberated from our fear of not being parents. We will be parents soon! Our dreams are big; including Tamara staying home for a while to be with baby and Tamara breastfeeding (this is possible without being pregnant), practice babywearing, and sharing our baby with all of our loved ones.  Thank you all for your supportive actions, sentiments, and prayers.

With love and hope,
Tamara and Tony

Trust the Process

We have a saying in the expressive arts that might have derived from Shaun McNiff, one of our expressive arts pioneers, it says....Trust the Process.

Well, we are in the process and have not had a lot of time to blog about it lately, sorry. We anticipated being finished with the home study process much sooner, but we are still doing it and have just a few things left to finish up. It will feel great to have that part finished :).

Thanks for hanging in there with us as we continue on this journey.  Tonight we will do a teleseminar to find out how to do things a little more quickly, less expensively, and with less heartache. Nicole Will at The Adoption Consultancy in Tampa is offering it. She specializes in helping couples like us adopt with the best possible circumstances and outcomes. I met her at a conference this spring and was very impressed. We'll see what she says tonight :).

We are also still folding cranes and sending thank you's for all of the amazingly generous people who have helped us to raise over $7,000 so far!!! Wow!!! Thank you a hundred times over!!

With love, hope, and gratitude,

Tamara and Tony

Awesome Fundraiser

We had an incredible time last night with the most amazing people at our Hoping4baby fundraiser!! It was heartwarming, humbling, and exhilirating all at the same time. Thank you to John and Mallie for organizing this amazing event and for ALL of the long hours of work that you put into it. We had friends everywhere helping and we just can't thank you all enough. The feeling of having you all in "our corner" is one of the precious gifts of this process of adoption. We feel touched by each of you and your generosity in a way that we just don't know how to describe. Although insufficient, we just want to says THANK YOU!
We were able to raise over $2,200 and it was FUN! After our baby is with us, won't it be great to have a party like that every year to honor all of you who helped us achieve our dream? It will be an honor to share our baby with each of you.

We'll post some pictures soon :) Thank you again!!

With love, gratitude,and hope,
Tamara and Tony