The Most Wonderful Christmas Gift

Yesterday, we received the call we have been waiting 8 months for: we got our referral!! Our agency called us Wednesday afternoon and told us that they had matched us with a two-year-old girl! She's healthy and beautiful, though only a mere 19 lbs.

We are delighted beyond words. We had hoped (and prayed) the referral would come before Christmas, but our adoption agency closes for the holidays after this Friday, so by Wednesday morning we had resigned ourselves to getting the referral in 2009. Then we got the call! What a happy, happy day.

(Ethiopian child protection laws do not allow us to post her photo/identifying information online until she is legally ours. But as soon as she is, we'll post pictures.)

Children's Hope FedEx'd us the hard copy of Kezia's info. and papers we need to sign and return in the next 4 days. The next step is getting a court date. The court appt. is what makes Kezia legally ours. We will travel to Ethiopia about 3-4 weeks after this occurs. That should happen sometime in the next 3 months. Until then, there is much to do to prepare.

Please pray for Kezia... protection and love, love, love to cover her. Also, grace for the court date to happen without any glitches. Sometimes they get rescheduled at the last minute. We'll keep you posted.

Have a most blessed Christmas!

"What's adopting?"

(NOTE: For the update on our adoption proceedings, scroll down to the 7/31 post, "Catching Up.")

Following is a conversation my six-year-old son, Sam, had with his friend Aiden on a recent play-date.

I had been asking Aiden about his brothers and sisters and then Sammy said:

Sam: We are adopting a baby from... from...
Me: Ethiopia.
Sam: Yeah, Ethiopia.
Me: That's in Africa.
Aiden: What's 'adopting'?
Sam: It's when you get a baby, but the mom stays regular and then you fill out all of these papers and then you get a baby.
Aidan: (After a thoughtful pause) Make sure you take a pen with you that doesn't run out of ink.
Sam: Yeah.
Me: (Trying hard to compose myself) Thank you, Aiden. That's very good advice.

Treasure

I was thinking today, as I often do, of something my friend Dana said in an email once. Norman and I had asked her to write a reference letter for us for our home study, and she was relaying to me the many hoops she had had to jump through just to get her letter notarized (oh, how I empathized). After thanking her profusely for her willingness to go through such trouble on our behalf, she said no problem, she understood about institutions and red tape and, in fact, believed there was probably a reason for such hassles. She went on to say that, "if any of these little inconveniences is enough to deter someone, then they shouldn't be trying to get no African treasure..."

African treasure... yes... that's what Kezia is to us (though an Ethiopian would kindly correct and say "Ethiopian treasure") and she is what I hold out in front of me every time I face another one of those "little inconveniences" (and some not-so-little ones). Kezia is what I think about when I get angry or irritated about the incessant red tape... the snail-like pace of things... the daily revisions to our ever-tender hope and expectations. Kezia is, after all, the Treasure we are working towards. She is the reason I can learn to live with and surrender such things. She is the reason I get up every morning and face another day hoping; the reason I can learn again to open my heart to another child; to stand with it wide-open and waiting for her to come and fill it in the way that only she can. The vulnerability of this terrifies me at times, but I don't care. She is worth it.

There is a freedom in that place, and a revelation: Only love can do that. I have not the courage for any of it apart from that-- of that I am most clear. But love can do it. Poured through and out of me, not of my own doing but His. Grace given if I let it. And every day that I can, I do.

(Thank you, Dana)

"Adoption is not a humanitarian act. It is a gift."

- Angelina Jolie

Catching up

It's August tomorrow and I haven't written in some ungodly amount of time, I know. I began our adoption journey with such hope; such earnestness... but it soon gave way to much deeper things emotionally; things I didn't feel inclined, at the time, to share with all of cyberspace. Norm and I hadn't fully realized what beginning the process of adding another child to our family would bring up after having lost a child. So I stopped and gave myself some space. Now, things are not quite so raw, so I thought I'd give this another try. There's perhaps more to tell now anyway and we do so want to keep our friends and family in our adoption "loop."

I changed the name of my blog to this verse in Habakkuk. I love Ubuntu (that one word could encapsulate such truth and grace is a wonder to me), but this verse uniquely speaks to our story. It's the verse I hold onto every day... the verse that speaks to God's plan and a dream long held... that encourages in the waiting that I sometimes think might break my heart... and my anchor in these often turbulent waters of international adoption.

Our "paper pregnancy" lasted-- get this-- 9 months. Our fully gestated dossier was finally delivered in April, 2008. I had been working steadily on our paperwork since last August and had completed it (I thought) three times before it actually got sent to our agency. Each time I sent it in for approval there was something wrong with one document or another. It was quite a learning curve-- Norm and I got very good at being utterly anal about keeping our ducks in a row (Norm's actually quite meticulous in general about such things-- I tend to shoot more from the hip-- and even he was surprised by just HOW meticulous things needed to be). What a wild ride it was!

(We are so thankful for gracious and extremely patient friends, family and notaries who contributed to our paperwork and bore with our aforementioned meticulousness. You blessed... )

By the time our third round of paperwork was rejected, the process had taken so long that some of our documents were expired and had to be redone. Two months later, our fourth submission was approved and our dossier was officially completed on April 8th, 2008. It was then sent to Washington D.C. to be authenticated and then bundled and sent off to Ethiopia in May. I was overjoyed and so relieved! The only shadow on that fine day was learning that referral times had been extended to 6-10 months (it had been 2-4 months when we started) which, translated, means that we will probably not get Kez until sometime in 2009 (up until that point, Norm and I were still holding out hope that we might be able to get her by the end of summer). I cried.

We of course knew it could happen-- our agency had been warning us that as more and more people start adopting from Ethiopia, there would be longer wait times. But Norm and I had both thought that we would be finished with our adoption before things got rolling to that extent. But the Ethiopia program is growing very fast, and our paper pregnancy went very S-L-O-W. Still, we hold out hope for a shorter rather than longer wait, even as we realize that this could very well be a grace to us. We do still need to come up with the second half of our adoption expenses. The money showed up in one form or another for our first three payments... we are praying for the same for our next three. Would you please pray with us for this?

Also-- please pray for Kezia. She's very likely already born, there in Ethiopia, facing who knows what circumstances each day in her very young life. Cover her with your prayers. They carry... they carry...