Hello Again and Part One

Well, it is pretty embarrassing that it has been over a year since I last posted to this blog. So many things have happened, which makes sense because it has been OVER A YEAR!! I did tell you, in one of the 3 posts I actually made to this neglected blog, that I do not have a good track record with updating. Sadly, I have proven that to be true. But it is time. There are too many things that will soon be forgotten if I do not record them somewhere. God is so faithful and He is weaving together a story, His story, and it is unlike anything we could have imagined or planned ourselves.

Some of you are aware of the twists and turns that have happened with this adoption. But some of you may only know what I have chosen to put on FB. I plan to post over the next few days to try and catch everyone up. But besides keeping everyone up to date, I want to record how God is working and give Him glory for the great things He has done.

Part One:

Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21

One very difficult part of the whole adoption process is the fact that you have to make choices. With a pregnancy, you really don’t have many choices. Sure, you might try to plan when the baby will be born but it is really out of your control. And you definitely cannot choose the sex of the baby, or whether or not the baby will be born healthy. But adoption is different. You have to choose which country you will adopt from, whether or not you are open to certain medical needs, and whether you want to adopt a boy or a girl. So you make choices, and then you have a plan.

With our first adoption, we were open to either a girl or a boy. Although we chose China, and most people think they only have girls for adoption in China, we knew different. We knew that there were many boys with medical conditions available for adoption in China and we wanted to be open to either a boy or a girl. Before we were matched with YouYou we even pursued a little boy. There is a couple from Huntsville that work at a wonderful organization that helps medically fragile orphans in China and we fell in love with a little boy there. Our agency tried to locate his file so that we could be matched with him but they were unable to find it. Months later I happened to read about him in a yahoo group and learned that his file was with another agency. Our agency was going to transfer all of our files and paperwork to the new agency if we were matched with him but another family ended up being chosen for him. Clearly, he was not our child and a few months later we were matched with our daughter YouYou.

This time around was different. For several years now YouYou has asked for a little sister. Before we had even had her home a year she was telling us that she wanted a baby sister. She can be pretty convincing too. She wasn’t the only one though. We both wanted her to have a sister, someone who looks like her and has a similar background. Because as much as we try to sympathize and understand what she has been through, the loss that she has endured, no one can completely understand unless they have shared similar experiences. We wanted YouYou to have a sister, so this was our request as we filled out paperwork and discussed our feelings with our social worker. We never even considered adopting a boy, and sadly, we never even thought to pray about it either.

On Saturday, October 13, 2012, I saw the picture of a little girl with a heart condition who had just been added to our agency’s waiting child website. She was so cute, and I immediately sent an email requesting to view her file. That afternoon I got an email back from a social worker who said that this child was already on hold for another family but that they would send me the file to look over and then we could be added to a list of interested families if we so desired. I looked over this child’s file and was immediately drawn to her. She had a similar name to our YouYou. YuanYuan seems like the name of a sibling for a child named YouYou, right? There were also several other things that were similar, and she had a heart condition which we knew was complicated but we were comfortable with. I emailed the social worker back and asked to be put on the list of interested families. And then we waited. I knew there was a good chance we would not be matched with this child because either the family would choose to move forward or there would be other families in front of us who would choose to move forward. So when I got an email from our agency on October 24 I was shocked. They told us we were being given the opportunity to review this child’s file and if we wanted we could put the file on hold for 2 weeks to give us time to get doctors to review the information, etc. We immediately decided to put the file on hold and then contacted YouYou’s cardiologist. By that evening we had heard back from him and although we learned more of how complicated her condition really was, we couldn’t find any good reason not to adopt her.

On October 25th we notified our agency that we wanted to pursue the adoption of this child and on October 30 our LOI was sent to China. The evening of November 5^th I received the email that we had gotten Pre Approval from China, which meant we could share our exciting news with everyone! We were thrilled and surprised that the approval came so quickly. It seemed like things were happening quickly and “just as we had planned.” It is so funny to even type that now because things were about to get crazy.