After all of the discouragement and sadness of the past several weeks, we were trying to hold onto some hope that we would find the child meant to be a part of our family. On March 11th, our agency rep emailed me to ask if we might consider a special need that was not on our special needs "list" (something the agencies ask you to research and "check" off so that they know best how to match you with a child) because she thought a child's file might appear the next night. We asked for a day to research and ask questions and I remembered that a Facebook group had been asking moms to do short "tutorials" on their children's special needs. One of the most recent posts was from a mom of a child with this particular need. I re-read her post and e-mailed her for more information. I also read more blogs, read health websites and medical documents, e-mailed some other moms on different Facebook and other groups, and we talked about whether this need might be something we could handle. We were nervous about it, but it didn't really seem to be a big deal at all. Overriding everything, though, was that we had just said "no" to two children and we did NOT want to ever do that again. We were on the verge of telling our agency that we didn't think we could consider the file if it appeared when a friend of mine asked, "Would you say yes to reviewing the file if you had not said "no" to those other children?" The answer was: yes. We were just so worried about saying "no" that we were almost too scared to look at a new file. Realizing that without risk, there is no reward, we told our agency that if the file appeared, we wanted to see the child's information.
The next night, I nervously watched the clock and the phone and, around 10 p.m., our agency rep called. She had the file. She told us that when she had seen the file pop up for a second on the "shared list" earlier in the week, our names came to her mind immediately. She said that although the file disappeared from the list, she just somehow "knew" that it would come back Wednesday night. We opened it cautiously and then saw our girl! She was beautiful and big and SMILING. Her file was full of positive information. And she was born the VERY DAY that we applied with our agency in January 2013. The day we took the big leap of faith, she was born!!
We sent her file to an international adoption pediatrician just to cover the bases, but we knew what he would say. And, by the next morning, we had an e-mail from him that read: "Lee Ann, we can talk more tonight, but I really just have three words for you: GO GET HER!!" "Nothing but positives" in her file, he said. And we agreed. I drafted our Letter of Intent and called our agency rep on March 15th and told her that she had found our girl.
And with that decision/phone call, all of our worries and angst and discouragement and sadness of the past couple of months disappeared. We called and emailed our families to tell them - and they were all so excited. We showed the boys her picture and Graham kissed the Ipad and Jackson said that she looked like Elsa from "Frozen." They immediately began discussing what specific things they would teach their sister.
No comments:
Post a Comment