The Start. One Year Ago.

A year ago I saw you for the first and perhaps last time in my life.

In the few minutes that you sat on our front steps you changed our lives forever.

You did not make a sound or say a word.

My heart dared not allow my body to step past the barrier of the screen door to look closely in your eyes, touch your soft skin or even feel your weight in my arms although I longed to.

You and her, the lady who held you remain in my prayers and thoughts. Where are you? How are you? What happened in the past year? I pray you are loved and thriving.

You opened our lives. Expanded our hopes and dreams.

Lord of the Ring fans will reconize this quote as refurring to when Merry and Pippin's interraction with the Ents comes to mind and applies to our family meeting you, "like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains. "

The small time spent seeing you and listening about your need started an avalanche: an avalanche of prayers, feelings, research, blogs, paperwork, hopes and dreams.

We will never be the same because of you. You changed our lives for the better.

Thankful for how the Lord used you.

Paperwork Progress

The home-study agency E-mails us with updates as the information and documents arrive to their office.

This week all our child abuse clearances arrived from the states we each lived in during our lives.

Our final medical papers, reports, and letters completed, notarized and in the mail today! 

All reference letters received by the agencies.

Information for fingerprinting, [who, when, where, how] researched and located for our first day in Michigan, hopefully Aug. 8th.

If all goes according to plan 'A' then in three weeks we will have completed everything we need to do in the application process and will be waiting for the finalization of our home study.

Finalized home study in hand will allow translation of Haiti dossier documents into French while at the same time completing the application for Advanced Processing of Orphan Petition, with the US Citizen and Immigration Services, I-600a.

July 27 will mark the 1 year anniversary of the door to adoption opening wide for our family.

Aloe barbadensis bloom

Choices..

The hardest parts of the application do not include writing down the facts but the choices.

Even some of the choices not too hard just a bit of discussion about references as who knows us the best, or who's seen both sides of our lives [Haiti & USA]. Then you send off an E-mail to ask them and fill in the contact information. Easy.

Hard: what type of child would you consider accepting into your family?

Now we did not have choices like these when the Lord sent us Eli and Anna as He did the choosing.

I remember when I started in High School praying regularly for my future husband and started a list. Yes, a real pen on paper list which consisted of two parts: the non-negotiables and the 'I think it would be nice'.

Non-negotiables included a man of strong love of God with a personal relationship with the Lord and a heart for missions. I knew that the Lord knew my tastes and desires and especially my needs even better than I did. My prayers recognized that I wanted His best choices for me and would trust Him.

Knowing that we would be needing to put on paper some ideas of the children we would be willing to be matched with those prayers for wisdom started at the same time the Lord opened the door to adoption.

We discussed the various options as a family and prayed, and prayed, and prayed..right up to the day that we finished filling in the first application.

We continue to pray  as we finish up with the paperwork part and move on toward the match that we need to remain open to the Lord's direction and learn as we go.

We 'think' we would like siblings, both a boy and a girl under the ages of 4. We remain open to children with special needs while realizing the limitation of our location. We do not believe it would be fair to accept a child who needs long term therapy or extensive medical care unavailable here.

Please join us in praying for 'our little ones' and for the whole process of matching our family with them. With the new procedures and Haitian social services matching families we have no idea how long following the arrival of our translated dossier to Haiti it will take before we match with our children.

[Tropical Dogwood, Mussaenda or Bankok Rose. The pink sepals are fuzzy]