As Lifetime Adoption celebrates its 30th year, we continue to find personal joy and fulfillment as we walk birth mothers and families through their unique adoption journey, step-by-step.

That’s why we’re starting a blog series, called “Then and Now.” At Lifetime, our staff gets to see families’ stories from the beginning. Lifetime’s staff is with our adoptive families every step of the way: from filling out our application online, to creating their adoption profile, and then to being chosen by a birth mother and adopting!

So, when they adopt we celebrate because we’ve been with them the whole way.

The first adoptive family in Lifetime Adoption’s “Then and Now” series is Nicholas and Kristin from Idaho. A young couple, they shared with Lifetime that they’d always dreamt of someday growing their family through adoption. In their adoption profile to present themselves to birth mothers, Nicholas and Kristin shared, “We are absolutely thrilled to become first-time parents. We feel that adoption is the path to parenthood that is meant for us. Our hearts and home are ready for the day we are blessed with a child! We are a fun-loving, adventurous, stable family of two, excited to begin our journey to parenthood. Seven years ago, we fell in love and found that we have so much in common: among these are our faith, our love of children, passion for traveling, and our strong work ethic.”

Nicholas and Kristin adopted a baby boy through Lifetime six months ago. They were overjoyed, as were the staff at Lifetime Adoption who helped make their adoption possible! They wrote to their adoption coordinator, Patty: “We’re thrilled to give you an update: at the beginning of the month, we finalized our adoption of Gabriel! Many friends and family came to the hearing and we celebrated afterwards with a big BBQ in our backyard.

We’ve been so blessed these past five months with our sweet guy. He is active and inquisitive, constantly smiling and on the move. We know that God worked out every detail of this adoption from start to finish. We feel honored to be chosen by the Lord and Gabriel’s birth mother to parent our son.

The waiting was a challenge–but it prepared us to never take a moment of this experience called parenthood for granted. He’s growing so fast, and it’s hard to believe that six months ago we had no idea how drastically our life would soon change for the better. We appreciate all that Lifetime did to support us in our time of waiting, and also for introducing us to the amazing young woman who changed our world forever by choosing us to parent Gabriel. Thank you!”

Written by Heidi Keefer

Heidi Keefer is a Content Creator for Lifetime Adoption and has 15 years of experience in the field of adoption. An author of thousands of blog posts over the years, Heidi enjoys finding new ways to educate and captivate Lifetime’s ever-growing list of subscribers.

Heidi has a keen eye for misplaced apostrophes, comma splices, and well-turned sentences, which she has put to good use as a contributor to Lifetime’s award-winning blogs. She has written and published hundreds of adoption articles which explore the various facets of domestic infant adoption today.