Adoption Day!

Today is August 20th.

This morning we dressed up real nice, loaded the family into our car and headed an hour away to a small town Texas court house.

Today is the day that we stood before a judge with huge smiles on our faces… hand in hand as one family… to officially make this boy our son.

Joshua Deondre Price

Although he will still go by Deondre, Sara and I wanted to give him a name that had meaning. We felt like Joshua was a good fit for him. Joshua was a man that feared God and that had many obstacles to overcome in his life… many battles to fight. He trusted the Lord through it all… and that’s our prayer for our boy too… that he would walk with the Lord through all of the trials that he may face in this life.

This past year has without a doubt been the most life changing for us. We sometimes sit on the couch at night and try to imagine what life was like those days before we had children in our house. Did we really just eat delicious food almost every night and then watch 24? How was that even possible?

We think back to those early days of him being in our home. Scared. Uncertain. Untamed. He had been through so much, and we had very little clue about what to do with this kid that all but fell from the sky into our living room. Each day brought new challenges that made us realize that we were clueless.

Today we celebrate all that God has done to get us to this place. How He has changed our hearts and placed a love deep inside of us for a boy that we did not know existed for the first 5 years of his life.

It’s really crazy to think about what we may have been doing when he was born. For me, I had just completed my sophomore year at Texas A&M, and was spending the summer working for an inner city ministry in Brenham. During those three months, the Lord really worked in my heart and gave me a love for kids from hard places. I spent many days hanging out in the projects with kiddos getting my eyes opened to the reality of what many people right in our backdoor experience day in and day out. I think my mind would have been blown if I had known that at that very moment, God was bringing a little boy into the world that would one day share my last name and call me “Daddy” instead of “Mr. Ryan”. Crazy how He works to prepare us for things in life.

Adoption isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many broken pieces that need to be mended together, and many of those pieces simply may never get the right fit. But, days like this are high points. Adoption day is a happy day for our family and we praise God that Deondre is excited about being adopted by us… although it’s still up for debate about whether he is more excited about getting to drink Coke on this day or being in our family for the rest of his life.  😐

We’re grateful for all the craziness that you bring into our family, little boy. We wouldn’t be complete without you.