Marcus' First Photo Shoot

Thanks to our awesome friend Kitty for taking all of these sweet pictures for us!

Marcus 3 1/2 weeks

These past few days with our son have been wonderful! I can't stop staring at him and just want to kiss him and snuggle him all day long! He is so sweet and loves to cuddle. It is incredible how much we already love him. Here are some pictures from the past few days!

Our Christmas Blessing

It is hard to know where to even start with this post! These past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions, but definitely all worth it! About a week after Thanksgiving we got an e-mail from our adoption agency telling us about this sweet little boy who had been born and they were looking for a family for him. We responded to that e-mail which let them know that we were definitely interested in being his parents and gave his birthmom a chance to look through our profile book. It took about a week for her to make a decision. During that week we felt excited, scared, nervous, joyful, and everything in between! We were so excited at the thought of being parents, and yet so nervous to get our hopes up because we knew that we weren't the only ones being considered. Finally we got a call saying that she had chosen us! It was awesome. We were both eating lunch with friends at the time and got to have a three way conversation with our social worker and she gave us all the details. The only thing that his birthmom asked is that we could all sit down and meet together. We said of course, we were so thankful for an opportunity to meet her and get to talk to her. We also got to meet her two other children, one of them being a full sibling to our sweet little baby. The meeting went wonderful. We could not have asked for a better birthmom. It was so obvious that she loved this little boy so much and she wanted him to be with a family that would love him just as much and take very good care of him. The next day we got to pick him up from his foster family! Yesterday we got to bring home our son, Marcus J. Neal!! He is so wonderful. He loves to snuggle, is incredibly cute, and hardly ever cries! It is amazing how much we love him already. We have been so incredibly blessed. From the beginning of our adoption journey we have been praying that we would get matched with our child before Christmas. Yay! God is so good! All of our friends have been so incredible in helping us get prepared this past week! One of our friends gave us tubs and tubs of little boy stuff from her twin boys and we even came home to a bag full of diapers, wipes, and newborn clothes! We are so grateful for all of the prayers and all of the support everyone has given us throughout this process!
The only thing left to say now comes from Psalms150:
1 Praise the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. 2 Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. 3 Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, 4 praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, 5 praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals.
6 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.


Here are some pictures from Marcus's first day with us!

Chillin out with his Mom :)

Marcus has the best Dad in the whole world! He is so blessed to have a father who wants to be so hands on and who loves him so much!

This is us meeting Marcus for the first time!

Marcus Neal, born November 24th, 2010, weighing 7 lbs 11 oz!

Shower Full of Blessings

Ever since we started the adoption process I have really been wanting to guard our hearts and not get a lot of baby stuff (or any) so that we wouldn't have it all just sitting around our house reminding us, especially if the process was going to take a long time, which most adoptions do. I kept saying- maybe after the homestudy we can start to get ready. Well, we finally finished all of our paperwork and homestudy and were approved in the beginning of November. So, a couple of weekends ago my awesome friends threw us a baby shower to help us be ready for when we get "the call." It was such a fun time to have so many friends in one place! We are so thankful for all of the fun, but very useful things that we got!! Here are some pictures!

So of course after I got home the room that we have started to get ready for our baby looked like this....

o my friend Elle (who is amazing at organizing!!) came over and helped me get the room to look like this!! We are so excited to bring home our sweet bundle of joy!