The BIG MOVE...(Mac's Adoption Story~Part 3)

This part of our journey or story is so beyond comprehension for me, except that I know with out a doubt that we were lead by our Heavenly Father's guiding hand. With out him we would not of made such a big move away from our family and friends, we would not of been chosen by our sweet angel C, we would not have found Mac, who was truly meant for our family.

We were approved to adopt the end of February. In March, Hubs started getting a little antsy in his job at the CPA firm in Portland. He started looking for jobs elsewhere, and for some reason he was mostly looking out of state.

At first when Hubs approached me about wanting to find a new job, I was upset as usual. I say "as usual" because Hubs does this about every 6 months, but only usually acts on it about every year. I quickly got over being upset and decided to be supportive of my husband.

Hubs suggested that it would be good for us to find a job out of state. I was actually fine with that. As he was looking online, he kept finding jobs in Montana. I kept on insisting that I would never live in the middle of no-where. But we both still felt good about finding a job outside of Oregon, so he kept looking.

He ended up finding a job opening with a previous employer (Enterprise Rent-A-Car). The opening was in St Louis. He applied for that job and stirred up something in the company (Hubs left that company a year and half earlier on very good standing and they all had very high regards for him and the work he does). They did not want him to take that job, because they thought that he was over qualified for it and that he would get really bored. But then he received a call about an opening with the same company but in the Montana group. I kept thinking, what the heck is it with all these job openings in Montana. The opportunity to get back in with this company was a big deal and would really help Hubs's career.

After attending the Temple and a little thought and prayer on the subject, we decided that it was perfect for us. But to make sure that we would like Montana, we decided to take a weekend and drive the 10 hour trip to Helena, Montana to just see what the little town looked like and if we felt like we could live there. We drove there all day Friday, spent the whole day Saturday looking around and exploring and then drove home Sunday. But on our trip home, we were really overcome with peace that this is really where we were supposed to be.

A couple of weeks later we were flown to Helena to find a place to live. And a couple of weeks after that, the beginning of May the movers showed up and packed all of our stuff and the next day the movers came and loaded it all up. It was all a whirlwind because this all happened with in a month. I actually was excited about the move. I was ready for a change and a new adventure. Little did we know of what was to come.

When we went to church, and introduced ourselves to someone in the bishopric. He said that he knew who we were because he worked for LDS Family Services and had just recently received all of our information from the Portland office. I was relieved that we were going to have that kind of contact with someone from the LDSFS. And not because I thought we would have one up on our "competition", it was because our experience with our caseworker in Portland was awful, and I was glad that we were going to know this guy better.

We ended up going to his office to talk to him a few weeks later, to talk to him about our previous experience and what we should be doing to find our baby, and also to talk about getting a new home study done. We came out of that meeting feeling much better. He basically told us that we needed to do more on our part and that he was sorry for the way we were treated before. And that he would include our "bishopric visit" as our home study (he and another member of the bishopric just came for a visit the week before, because we were new in the ward.

One thing I remember very clearly about this visit was him telling us about a birthmother he was currently working with. I don't remember exactly why he was telling us about her, I think we just had a concern/question about adoption in general and he was using her as an example to answer out question. I remember him saying that this birthmother was pretty on the ball and has clearly made her decision to place her baby. And that she wouldn't say who the birthfather is and that that may make it a legal risk adoption. And he had gone on giving us other examples of adoptions he had worked with.

Shortly after this visit with our caseworker, we decided that we would put together a letter to mail out to everyone we knew. And I also decided that I would announce on our blog that we were hoping to adopt. We never got around to getting the letter done and sent out, because exactly one month after the previously mentioned post, we got OUR CALL!