Referral Call #3

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has been praying for us lately!  I know there are people who have prayed for us that we will not meet this side of heaven.  Knowing that our brothers and sisters in Christ, some that we don't even know, have been lifting us up before our Father has been such a blessing.  We are finally ready to share some news that is an answer to prayer!

Monday, March 14th 2011 was an unusual day. I woke up to snow. James was still home because the roads were a mess from the snow. He usually leaves really early in the morning before I'm awake. I had to go to the doctor's office at 9 am to get some lab work done, nothing serious. Just routine stuff. Since the roads were bad, James drove me to the doctor's office. We were scheduled to meet our social worker for lunch at 11:30, and the weather did not prevent us from doing that. James and I meet her and her boss at a little Italian restaurant in St. Louis' Italian district. We talked about our plans and asked about a hundred questions about domestic adoption. We left a little after 1:00 and I drove James to work. I had a little shopping that I wanted to do, so I went to Bed Bath and Beyond. After I was finished in the store, I went back to my car and I checked my phone to see if I had missed any calls. Sure enough, I had a voice mail from our social worker. She had a referral for us to consider, but it was for a child who was outside of our age parameters (1-3 years old).

A word about our age parameters: We had recently told our agency not to hold those as a hard and fast guide. We told them if there was a child who they felt we'd be a good match for, but was slightly outside of our parameters, to let us know.

I called James to see what he thought and we called our social worker. We were on the phone with her for about 15 minutes listening to her tell us what she knew about this little girl. We needed to decide if we wanted her to send us the referral documents or not. We decided to think about it for an hour and agreed to call each other at 4 pm. I went on to Micheal's and picked up some supplies to make a wreath for Easter. I called James back at 4:00, and we decided that we should call our social worker back and let her know that we did indeed want the referral information emailed to us.

We both have smart phones, so we could have opened the email and seen her pictures right away. I wanted to wait. After what we've been through I wanted to clear my head and pray before we got too involved with this little girl. I went to the mall and did a little shopping for James while I waited to go pick him up from work. I picked him up at 5:45, and then we had a counseling appointment. It was about 7:30 before we got home. We finally opened the email together and saw her pictures for the first time.

 She is just beautiful. I'm going to refer to her here as "Baby M." She is 8 months old, and she is doing really well. She can hold her head up, she is getting close to being able to sit up by herself. She can hold her toys and play peek-a-boo. She can stand with support. She can roll over and she is affectionate with caregivers. Our social worker sent us an update today with 12 pictures in it. This is the first update that we have ever received that had good news! We even got a few pictures of the orphanage that she is staying in.  We are praying that we can travel before the courts close for the rainy season in August.  Our anniversary is in June, and we'd love to spend our anniversary in Africa this year.

 These were taken a couple of days later after we signed the acceptance papers.

 We are thankful that God has placed this little girl in our lives, and we are relieved that she is healthy. I will admit that it is hard for me to feel super excited about where we are. After what we've been through, I know that there are still a lot of things that could go wrong. This baby may or may not ever be our daughter. So, we pray. We pray for Baby M and her birthmother. We pray that Baby M will be home with us soon. We pray for God to continue to heal our hearts so that we can once again say, with no reservation, that He is good, He does have a wonderful plan for us, and that He loves us with a love bigger than we comprehend.