Today on The Girl Defined Show, Zach and I will be sharing our entire adoption story for the first time and then answering a bunch of your questions at the end.

Hey everybody, it's Kristen and Zach here.

This has been a long time coming. You guys have been asking us to share our adoption story pretty much since we announced the adoption.

And I knew the day would come when we would, but it has been, I don't even think it's been three full months yet since our international adoption has been complete.

Um, Zach's giving me big eyes. They've been three months me over three. Yeah. Oh really? Yeah. Wow. Well time has flown by and it's, it feels like a lifetime, but then at the same time, it's kind of crazy that it has only been a few months since we've gone from a family of two to a family of four.

So it's been an exciting wild ride with lots of ups and downs and joys and challenges. Wouldn't you say crazy? Super fun, super hard, exciting, but yeah, it's been been quite the time.

Going through right. God has been so faithful though. So we're going to rewind a little bit though and take you guys back to a quick flyover of the past 10 years because we actually just celebrated 10 years of marriage. What?

That seems like a flew by. Oh, that's so sweet to hear you say that flies when you're having fun. It is crazy, though. I feel too young to be having to have been married for a decade. Do you feel that way?

Um, yeah, in my head, I think I'm still just barely out of high school. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't view us that way. I meet these.

My kids calling me sir. This is the problem. Yes, sir. Like, no, no, that's my father. So we wanted time with us back to June of 2011. That is when we got married.

And I think like any couple we just had dreams and hopes and we just imagined our future would kind of unfold the way that we we thought.

And I know for both of us, we thought we'd probably have kids within the first few years of marriage, um, go on to, you know, have as many kids as we wanted.

We were both excited about having a big family. Um, and then that is not what happened at all. So first few years of marriage, we didn't get pregnant.

And we weren't preventing. So we assumed that it would just happen naturally. It didn't. Um, and, you know, during that time, we weren't super concerned.

But I think at the two year mark, like shortly before that, I was starting to wonder, like, is something wrong. Um, and then we got pregnant.

And that was super exciting right after our two year anniversary. And then as a lot of you know that ended in a miscarriage, which was super tragic and just, I think shocking because

I'm from a really big family and, you know, eight kids. And I just assumed, like, yeah, my mom was able to have lots of kids. Like I'll be able to no problem.

And what I thought was really trusting the Lord, I realized through that miscarriage that I had been in some ways.

I think idolizing motherhood and kind of holding on to it with a tight grip and just, just imagining, like, oh, my plans will just work out.

And like God will bless me in the way that I'm, that I'm praying. Right. And so that first miscarriage happened rocked our world.

Um, just as a married couple, it was the first time we had gone through something just grieving like that together.

So really, really challenging, growing for us. And then six months later, I got pregnant again, but then the same thing happened like within six weeks.

...