The Boy

As I am typing this, Emily is trying to go to sleep.  She struggles with sleep and hence we all struggle with sleep. We try this and that and everything in between. I think it's just going to take a lot of time. The boy hopefully will sleep.

I am having so much nostalgia.  Last year this time we were matched with Em. We thought about her all of the time. Everywhere I went I thought "In a few months I'm going to be doing this with a baby!" Now everything I do I think "In a few months I'm going to be doing this with two toddlers!" Sometimes I have to stop myself because I want him so desperately bad it physically hurts to not have him here.

His story is such a testament to me of how Heavenly Father is so present in the details of our lives. We are a family of girls. We never wanted boys, we never thought about boys, we hoped that each of our pregnancies were girls and when it was time to adopt, we felt we were having girls!

We are doing the boy's adoption on Emily's paperwork. You can do two adoptions on one dossier but it has a time limit.  Right after we got home from China, I was way too overwhelmed to even think about adopting again. Gary asked me one night, "Would you do it again?" My answer was "No.  Too hard." His response was "I'd do it again in a second, that was amazing!!" I thought for a while that Emily would be the tail ender, sort of an only child, and it will be fine. But the nagging continued.  I couldn't leave it alone. We looked at a couple of files, but it was all wrong. I couldn't figure out why or what, but I was unsettled completely.

One night, my awesome friend (the one that originally opened up China to me in the first place) sent me some pictures of 4 little boys. They were adorable to say the least and for the first time in my life I considered a boy. When I prayed about it, it was a boy! That was my answer. I was no longer unsettled, I was on a mission! I had been looking at the wrong files, girl files. In January, I was completely anxious. I knew something was happening, I just didn't know what. One morning, I got online and CCAI had posted several new children. I immediately looked at the boys.  I opened up a file, and there he was. My little boy.

I knew him immediately, he was ours for sure. I emailed right away and got the response "I'll add you to the list, I can't believe how many people are interested in this little boy!" NO NO NO NO NO!! He was mine! Only one family at a time can look at a file, if they say no then it goes to the next family. Where was I on the list? #5. 4 families would have to turn him down! I prayed like crazy for the next month. I checked on him 20 times a day to make sure he was still on there.  I was sent another file of a little boy who had the "severe" special need of low birth weight.  I tried to love him. I tried to make him mine, but in the end, we felt nothing at all for him.  We gave his file back after only a day.  A couple of days later, CCAI called me. She said "Do you know that that baby is healthy? You turned down a healthy baby. I have to ask why?" "He wasn't mine." it was the only response I could give her, and it did not satisfy her. I told her "We know how it felt when we found our daughter, and that little boy was not ours. We would not take him from his family just because he was healthy." She scolded me a little bit and sort of told me that we were running out of time, and we needed to do XYZ if we were going to get a second baby. I was so frustrated! I knew my little boy! I told her that I was still on a list for another little boy to which she replied "Don't get your hopes up for that one, he'll go fast." I hung up and cried my eyes out! I told Gary "He is our little boy, if we don't get him, I will not look at another file ever again. He is my baby." About two hours later I got a voicemail from CCAI that said "You'll never believe that right after we hung up, the little boy's file that you have been waiting on came available!! I'm supposed to get your permission to send it over, but I'm sending it anyway!"  And that is how we got our boy.

We weren't ready to have a boy last year. He was barely born when we were ready to say yes to two. God knew how to prepare our hearts and minds to accept a baby boy and to know him when he came. We have sooo much immigration work to do for him.  It's taking forever! We pray for our paperwork everyday that it will go quickly. We're hurrying as fast as we can and we hope the US Government will do the same!