The Schneider’s Adoption Journey

Fast forward to the spring of 2024. I was pregnant with our baby, Judah.

Remember me saying that I just didn’t feel quite done carrying and nursing another baby? Judah was the gift of that desire.

But here is the part that stands out to me: I was sitting in our living room, pregnant with him, and still emailing, researching, and looking into adoption. Adoption had not gone away. It was still deeply on my heart.

At that point, I was looking seriously into international adoption and even calculating how old “this baby” would need to be before we could start the process. We eventually decided against international adoption for a couple of reasons. First, many countries would not allow us to adopt because we already had five children. Second, we kept coming back to the thought: there are children right here in our own country who need families too. We felt like we should focus on adoption in the United States first.

So even while we were preparing to welcome Judah, we were still asking what adoption might look like for our family.

The next part of our story comes about a year later, in the spring of 2025.

We are now in the summer of 2021. After what happened with L, we began seriously talking about adoption as a way to grow our family. At the same time, Olivia still had a deep desire to be pregnant and breastfeed at least one more time. Somehow, she came across an article about embryo adoption. We had never even heard of it before, and we were so excited. It felt like a way we could pursue adoption while also fulfilling Olivia’s desire to carry and nurse one more baby.

There are more than a million frozen embryos in the United States right now, and we were excited by the prospect of giving some of these babies an opportunity at life. We applied to Nightlight’s embryo adoption program and were accepted. We were set to adopt two embryos, possibly even from different families, and we were open to adopting embryos that were considered less desirable or lower rated. We met with the embryologist, and he spoke as though we could be pregnant by fall.

But as things became more real, Bryan had a hard time wrapping his mind around another couple’s biological child growing inside Olivia. He also wrestled with whether Olivia would have a bond with the baby because of carrying him or her in a way he never could, and whether he would be able to bond well too. He was also concerned that if he had that hesitation going in, it would not be right to bring a baby into the world that way. For him, it became a Romans 14:23 matter.

But our adoption journey did not end there. The next chapter comes in the spring of 2024.

We are now in 2020. My mom met a young woman on the train as she came to visit us in Iowa. This young woman was fighting to get clean from drugs, and she was doing a great job. She had a young toddler. Over the next six weeks, we became knee-deep in ministering to her and her son. But slowly, she started drifting back into the wrong crowd and losing the strong drive she had. Then COVID hit, and we lost touch with her. In the winter or spring of 2021, she overdosed and passed away.

That was when adoption started to become much more real to us. After learning of her death, we were heartbroken for her little boy. We called DHS and asked, “Does L need a home? We want to open ours to him if needed?” He ended up in a family member’s home, but that did not stop adoption from pressing more deeply on our hearts.

Next up is what happened in the summer of 2021.

Adoption began in our hearts long before we ever knew each other. As children, both of us imagined that someday we might adopt. We arrived at that desire separately, years before we met, and we believe God was the one who placed it in our hearts.

In our first year of marriage, we miscarried our first baby at five weeks and then walked through a season of infertility. During that time, we began looking into Bethany Christian Services, wondering if adoption was the path God had for us. Soon after, we became pregnant with our oldest son.

Four children later, in 2020, our adoption story began to take root in a deeper way. This was only the beginning, and we look forward to sharing more in our next update.