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!

7 months

One year ago today, I called my adoption agency to see how things were going, and just be nosey in general and ask why we hadn't received a referral yet. The lady that I spoke to couldn't find my file which made me nervous until she said (after several minutes of looking) "It was on my co-workers desk waiting to call you with a referral!"  My heart started pounding so hard, I couldn't believe it! She told me that this little girl had heart defect, cleft lip and palate, severe delay, and delayed mobility. As she spoke, my head was rushing a million miles an hour. Could we handle all of those special needs? That was a lot more than I believed we would get. We had said yes to all of those special needs, but  were we meant to get all of them at at the same time, with the same child? My heart was aching at the thought that this could be my daughter, could I handle all of it? All of a sudden, my mouth opened up and said "Yes! Send her file over, we'd love to look at it!" Gary was in China on business at the time, it was about midnight his time. I texted him and told him we had a referral coming. I waited in front of my computer for about 10 minutes. It never came. I called CCAI and went straight to voicemail. I waited and waited and WAITED some more. Gary texted me nervously "Where is it?? What's taking so long??" FINALLY we got the first of two emails. NO PICTURES!! It contained details of her special needs and I was again questioning if I could handle this little tiny thing that needed so much care! The second email came with pictures. The first picture made me smile. She was very cute.  The second picture, this one, made me gasp out loud. I knew this girl. She was my daughter. Gary knew her too, she was ours.

We didn't say yes right off. She honestly scared me a little bit. We sent her file to our pediatrician. He told us that his initial thought was merely failure to thrive. We got our first lesson in -orphanage records can be pretty inaccurate-! He laughed when he looked at her heart report. He said "I don't mean to make light of a potentially serious situation but if her heart is doing what they say it's doing, she'd be dead. It's not even possible." Through a lot of prayer, we knew without question that she was our daughter. Her special needs scared us less and less as the days went on, and three days later, we called our agency to tell them that we would happily accept this little doll with "eyes that were round and black like little grapes." We then began the crazy intense paper chase to complete all of her immigration  paperwork to bring her home.

 1 year later, she is the center of our lives. She has 5 people at her beckon call. She is our favorite thing, the best part of our day, the happiest little bit of our lives. She is so loved, so adored, so sweet and cute and cuddly! 

 We have been living adoption now for nearly two years. It's constant. We are still missing one. We feel him, we love him, we pray for him, we name him daily, we wonder about him all of the time.

 Understanding the reality of an orphan, of having a child on the other side of the ocean, of having my heart fragmented again, makes this wait intensely more difficult. It is twice as long, and 100 times more difficult. Knowing how easily and deeply and completely we fell in love with Emily, my heart honestly aches at all times for my little boy.

 We work fast and furiously for a few days, then we send that off and wait interminably it seems like. Then we get something back and work like maniacs for a day or two, send if off! phew!! WAIT and wait and wait. It's hard. Adoption is not for the weak. It's so hard!!

 But sooooooo worth it!! It's the most amazing thing ever!

A few more months to go, several actually, and we will be living life instead of living adoption. We will be together as we were meant to be. A family of 7. We will say every day several times just as we do now "What would we have done without him?" and we will thank Heavenly Father every day, many times, for leading us to our precious babies in China.