Get To Know Our Family... A Little Bit Ü
Hello! Welcome to our blog, we hope you'll enjoy following along as we navigate this crazy world of International Adoption! Our goal here is to bring awareness to adoption, specifically from Liberia. But also to show you that you can do this adoption thing affordably. We'll walk you through our fundraiser ideas and you'll get to see if they fail or succeed at the same time we do! Let's hope for lots of success!
Now, let's give you a little back ground into our family! We are the Mandile's. I'm Jessica, and I'm married to my high school sweet heart Brian.
We did some steps backwards in the sense, first came baby then came marriage. The lessons we learned from that experience are invaluable, and have helped shape who we are today, we wouldn't change it! We were married when I was 17 and Brian was 18 and just 6 months later on April 23, 2002 we had our first born, Maci! She keeps us on our toes but also brings us so much joy!
The "plan" was to have 4 kids 3 years apart, and that plan was going perfectly until we had our first miscarriage in July of 2004, I was devastated. Although, the plan was still going to work because just a month later I was pregnant again. Our first little boy, we were so excited, until I was 36 weeks along, he stopped moving, we found out he passed away in my tummy. THAT was the most devastating trial we would face together. As we were in the hospital finding out this devastating news Brian brought up adoption, he knew that was a thing I've always wanted to do. Although it just wasn't right for us at that time. I delivered a beautiful baby boy Broc Christopher on
April 30, 2005
After Broc, I couldn't wait to get pregnant again, thankfully it didn't take long, we had our 3rd child April 17, 2006 2 weeks shy of Broc's 1 year. Another beautiful baby boy who was crying and his eyes were open! My rainbow after my storm, Kernan.
After Kernan was born, I was happy with our little family, I didn't want to go through the stress of being pregnant again and the fear of losing another baby. I did end up getting pregnant when Kernan was 18 months old. But that ended in another miscarriage.
When Kernan was ready to go off to kindergarten I realized I was way too young to be alone at home all day, so we decided to have another baby, McKenna was born on April 2, 2012.
A few years later we decided that for our last one we would look into adoption. It's something I've wanted since I was really little, and I didn't want to be pregnant again. Well little did we know we were already 3 weeks pregnant! Yep, Heavenly Father was really loving our discussion and planning. MacGyver our "uh oh" was born November 4, 2015. He's the best "uh oh" ever!
But my heart still longed to adopt... After a little convincing, Brian agreed, and here we are!
I hope our story can help anyone else that is on the fence thinking about adopting. I also hope that by sharing our story along the way, maybe people out there with some more experience can help guide us as we trudge through all this paper work!
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