March 12th

At 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12, 2014, we received a phone call that changed our lives.  It was our agency representative and she had locked a file for us.  It was the file she “just had a very strong feeling” would be on the list that night.  It was the file of a little girl with albinism.  We had been told that her file might appear - if it was somehow meant to be - and we had wildly researched and read and discussed albinism during the prior two days.  My hands were shaking as I held the phone.  The emailed file that was about to be sent could be our daughter. At 9:48 p.m., we saw her face (in pictures) for the first time. 

We quickly scanned the file and I knew…she was the one.  She was big and healthy and beautiful and was meeting all expected milestones.  Even better, she was smiling and her eyes were sparkling!  (rare in orphanage pictures).  I knew what the doctor would say when we sent her file to him.  And, he did.  “Go get her!” he wrote to me.  And …about three months later, we did.

("Adoption Day" and now pics)

The night we first saw those baby pictures seems so long ago now in some ways.  Our youngest son calculated (using his new kindergarten math skills!) that we’ve now had Emily for 257 days (since “gotcha”).  It sometimes seems like even longer.  Even though we lived our life as a family of four for 5 1/2 –plus years before Emily came, it’s getting more and more difficult to remember what our lives were like before she joined our family. 

We talked the other night about how nervous we were when we said “yes” to her file.  It was a big step.  But, now it seems silly to have worried.  She is wonderful and sweet and smart and incredible (do I sound like her Mama?) and we feel so very lucky and so very grateful that she has assimilated so easily into our lives and into our family.  Once she decided to love us, she never looked back.  When her brother fell out of a chair and cried (comical scene at a restaurant) the other night, she run to hug him and patted his back saying “OK, OK” over and over again.  She stands at the glass door to our garage whenever family members leave and she holds her fingers in the sign language “I love you” sign and she sings “love, love, love, love, love, love” until they drive away.  She’s the only one who still comes charging down the hall, arms open wide, yelling “Mama!” or “Dada!” when we come home from work.  She is speaking English like any other recently-turned-two year old and she says “MYself, MYself” for most tasks because she wants to try it by herself.  She has a great ear for music and has taken up where her brothers left off years ago in a love for Thomas the Train (good thing we never got rid of that stuff!).  She demands “choo choo songs” to be sung until she falls asleep at night.  Sometimes she wakes up the night or from a nap and says “hi” in a slow drawn-out way and in the sweetest voice in the world.  Her new thing is to yell "Come ON!" whenever people are dawdling in their response to whatever she has requested.  I am sometimes still in awe that this precious child is my daughter and that we’ve been given the privilege and opportunity to be her parents and family. 

Everything changed for us last March 12^th.  We will never forget that night or how we felt when we first saw Emily’s face.  It was an amazing, scary, overwhelming, wonderful, crazy night.  We had no idea then how much joy she would bring to our lives, the loving/caring side she would bring out in our boys, the fun and comedy she would insert into our family routines, the sweetness she would show to animals and to her teachers, the huge heart she would have, the quick wit she would possess, or the resilience she would show at having her whole life uprooted and taken away and changed all at once.  March 12^th will always be a special day in the life of our family. 

It's the day we found our daughter!