GREAT NEWS! OUR FAMILY IS GROWING!!!

It is with great joy and excitement that Jon, Annalise, Noah, and I want to announce that our family of four is growing to be a family of FIVE!

Please meet Elliot Alexander Dansby. 

He was born on February 3rd, 2012 and came home to our house on March 28, 2012.

Once we recovered from Noah's season of screaming and colic when he was a baby, we knew we wanted to continue growing our family. We knew that the Bible calls us to care for widows and orphans and wondered what that looked like for our family. I also knew that I didn't want to give birth to any more giant babies (see 8lb 8oz Annalise (born 4 weeks early) here and 9lb 9oz Noah (born 5 weeks early) here- by the way, they were both technically premies!) We knew that God was calling us to grow our family via adoption. God has graciously adopted us into his family, how can we not welcome others into ours?

We attended a conference called Together for Adoption in October 2010. After the conference we knew that we wanted our adoption to be an open, domestic adoption of an infant. We prayed about our decision for a couple of months and filled out our first paperwork for Generations Adoptions in mid April of 2011. Over the summer of 2011 we completed a lot more paperwork, had our homestudy completed, and got our profile together for birth mothers to see. Our profile was available for birth mothers to look at in November 2011. 

We got chosen by our sweet and wonderful birth mother (Who I will call J for now. I'm not trying to be secretive but want to have her permission before I include pictures of her and her name.) in December and met her for lunch in December 16, 2011 which was also our eleventh anniversary! We are super excited that we will continue to have a friendship with her for many years. We will see her at least once a year and have already exchanged many sweet emails. I am so excited for Elliot to grow up knowing that she loves him so deeply. He will also always be able to ask her questions and also will get the privilege of knowing an extra grandmother and 2 half sisters.

Elliot was born on Friday February 3, 2012. He was born early in the morning and we got to the hospital that afternoon to spend time with him and J and her great family.

Here I am holding him for the first time right after we arrived at the hospital-

Jon and I with our new little boy!

We spent the entire weekend in the town where he was born and spent lots of time hanging out with J, Elliot and her family on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Here are some other pics-

 Because we were waiting for a few legal things to take place before we were allowed to bring Elliot home, we left the hospital on Sunday and took him to Waco where he lived with a transitional care family for 54 days. Here we are getting ready to leave the hospital-

On February 28th, 2012 we took the kids to Waco to meet Elliot and visit him. Noah and Annalise were SO excited! Noah cried when we had to leave to go home because he really wanted Elliot to come home with us.

Check out how excited Noah is!

 Here is Annalise sharing her lovey with Elliot.

 All hands on deck for feeding time!

Here are a few more pictures of our cute little guy (when he was about 3 weeks old)-

 Check out his handsome curls!

We are so excited to be on this new journey and can't wait to see what God has in store for our family of 5! Stay tuned for more pictures and updates about Elliot and the rest of our family.