This shop was created as a way for me to raise funds to go towards the adoption of our first child. He is now home with us and this is my creative outlet as well as a way for me to stay home with him more.
Our names are Ronnie and Savannah Gilbert. We met in December of 2011 through mutual friends, became engaged in November 2012, and married May 11, 2013. Before we got married, we went through marriage counseling. This was great as it allowed us a chance to discuss things that could come up at some point of our marriage and go ahead and see if we were on the same page or not. Two big topics that came up: having children and adoption. Both of us had a strong desire to have children. During our marriage counseling, we agreed that we did not want to try until after a year of marriage. We were young, neither of us had lived with another person (other than our parents) before, and we really felt that we needed this time to build the foundation of us and our marriage. Adoption was something that we both agreed on immediately as something we would love to do later on in life. Around January 2015 we went ahead and started trying to start a family. To summarize, we had trouble getting pregnant. We learned that I had PCOS, was not ovulating, and I was unable to achieve pregnancy until August 2016. Three days after learning we were pregnant, on August 28, 2016, we miscarried (we chose to name our angel Riley Ray Gilbert). Over the next several years, we lost three more babies (Oakley, Shiloh, and Amelia). From August 2016 through December 2020, we learned so much about trying to conceive and there were various conditions that we learned I (Savannah) had. In December 2020, we received the answers that we had craved for so long and that is when we finally felt closure from our journey trying to conceive and decided to explore other options. After several months of research and consideration, we decided that adoption was how we wanted to grow our family.
After two and a half years of painful waiting, we found our son, Ryder. Reading about him, something just clicked for my husband and I. Talking to him on video call the first time, those feelings were reinforced. Meeting him- it felt impossible to go home without him. Him finally coming home to us- felt like the best day of our lives. Now, I want to be able to spend as much time as possible with him.
