One Sought Me

You are meeting Todd and Erin Vogtman and family through photos. Welcome! Hi! We had a tremendous time during our backyard photo shoot in the fall of 2011. We all felt so comfortable with very low stress of the photo shoot, especially from the parent perspective.  Have you ever taken kids to a cramped, crowded, hot and stuffy studio hoping to get everyone to look at the camera and smile at the same time? Nearly impossible. Home shots are the new way to catch our family in photos, that is for sure. Visit our photographer's site here (we're featured on his home page.) We believe that our family members were divinely ordered to be who they are and where they are because of a creator who arranged it that way.  Our four kids are so unique from one another in many ways.  We try to encourage them to learn from each other and learn to be a team.  Currently the kids ages are 9,6,4, and 2, but birthdays are coming up in the next 2 months for the middle kids.  As you...

I have to admit that Ethiopia wasn't the first place we considered when looking into adopting internationally.  However, various countries that were once available to work with the U.S. are currently experiencing situations that have closed adoption processes either temporarily or permanently with the U.S. ( see this unfortunate current news about adoptions in Russia ). Also, since we already have biological children, and 4 at that, many countries will not accept families with bio children to adopt and/or families with over 3 bio children to adopt.  The list of requirements goes on and on, depending on the country. When we were in contact with our agency in the research and questioning phase, they suggested Ethiopia to us asking if we would consider it. Our response was, "a child in need is a child in need, no matter where they might be on the map."  This is where our heart is.  We do meet all the requirements for adopting from Ethiopia, especially since there is ...

There are 153 million orphans world wide.  To understand how vast of a crisis this is, first we need to  comprehend what that number really means. How long would it take to count to a million? Consider counting once per second (until those numbers get big and it'll take longer than one second just to say the number) counting eight hours a day, seven days a week, it would take a little over a month to count to one million! 1 million days = approx. 2,700 years               If 153 million people stood shoulder to shoulder they would easily line the 10, 913 mile perimeter of the United States over four times. If you could pray for an orphan with every breath you take , at 10 breaths/1 minute (then do the math) it would take you over 2 months. If all the states population along the East coast of the U.S. plus Kentucky and Tennessee's population you would be near 140 million people.  So add the population of Texas and you'd be ju...

Wow, this is my first ever blog post! Welcome and I promise that our posts will get better, but I'm exhausted just from setting up.  That took a really long time for me (and our friends help! Thank-you!) to figure out all this blogger language and how to do just about everything from scratch when making a blog.  Things I never knew existed can all be found by Googling "how do I....?"  No wonder people devote their entire blog sites to how to make a blog site! Good job out there! You steered this gal in the right direction! It's almost like the little white search bar holds the key that unlocks answers to all questions. Powerful little white search bar. If I can just Google, "What is the weather tomorrow?" or "How do I roast a chicken?" then wouldn't it be something if I asked "What is 2013 going to bring my family?"  "Will there be more children?" "How long will that take?" "Where are they and how are we go...