Adoption Journey started in the middle of the night.
In the dead of night, everything changed. The last leg of their adoption journey began.
At 10:30 PM, the family had completed their nightly routine. All three children’s teeth were brushed and asleep. The parents drifted off to sleep.
Totally unaware that in less than four hours, their world would explode into a whirlwind of joy, panic, and anticipation.
They couldn’t have imagined that a woman they’d never met had just made the most profound decision of her life—choosing them to parent her child.
At 2 AM, their silenced phones were receiving noiseless messages.
“You’ve been chosen.”
“Pack your bags. Your baby is waiting.”
“It all worked,” Sherie* said. “Honestly, so many things that God just said, ‘Let me take care of this for you.’ Right down to a woman we love in an open adoption.”


If their three-year-old hadn’t had an earache, the couple wouldn’t have checked their phones, and they wouldn’t have received messages about how they needed to catch a plane and pick up their baby.
It’s hard to be grateful for an earache. But in this case . . .
Other coincidences—coincidences that Sherie calls—blessings on this adoption journey.
“We couldn’t have made the trip and the ten-day stay without my sister,” Sherie said. “She has babysat our children before. She was the perfect person to travel with us so that we could be at the hospital and do paperwork.

Sister joins adoption journey
“My sister had been on a trip and returned just a few hours before we had to fly out to California. She is a schoolteacher,
“My sister had been on a trip and returned just a few hours before we had to fly out to California. She is a schoolteacher, and she had two weeks in her whole summer when she didn’t have commitments. And those two weeks were July 4 through July 18. The exact days we needed her.
“No one could have planned that. God’s planning.”
ICPC Part of the Adoption Journey
Sherie continued to explain how they were concerned about how long ICPC would take.
ICPC (Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children) is a set of laws shared across the United States that controls how children being adopted can cross state borders before the adoption is finalized.
Both states—where the child was born and where the child is going to reside with adoptive parents—need approval by a judge before the child can cross state lines.
“My sister had helped us all week, but she had to get home,” Sherie said, “Flying with four kids, one with medical issues, was going to be difficult, and we wanted her with us, but we hadn’t heard from ICPC. Our home state hadn’t approved yet.
“We would need to get our ICPC clearance by 11:00 on Thursday for the latest flight out. We were just praying, ‘Let ICPC come through.’ No word. No word. So, on Thursday at 11, we hadn’t heard anything, so my husband bought my sister a ticket. She would leave without us. The two of them were walking out the door to the airport when we got the call. YAY!!! We didn’t really pack; we just started throwing things into suitcases and rushed to the airport.

“The plane was almost completely full. We needed seven seats, and somehow, those seats were available. Another blessing.
“Remember Delta’s IT crash. It happened as we were in the air. We knew a couple that took three extra days to get home. What would we have done with four kids stranded in the airport for three days? It would have been a nightmare.
“You can call it coincidence. We felt blessed.”