A Picture Can Tell a Thousand Words

Things I have learned about our little angel from the pictures I have received:
* She was sad on the day they took her referral picture
* She has a beautiful smile
* She can act shy, but she really loves to smile
* She likes to be silly
* She has beautiful straight teeth
* She does not like to be left in her crib
* She can go from tears to the most beautiful smile you have ever seen
* When she cries, or is about to cry, she puckers her nose
* She looks beautiful in light pink
* Her face can express a thousand emotions

Since we received our referral on August 4th we have received 13 pictures of our little baby girl. Every time we get new ones we are blessed with another little glimpse into her personality. From the first two photos we received we really knew nothing about her - other than she looked sad. The next three showed us that she could smile, and that she was willing to smile for a random person. The next four showed that she not only can smile...but that her face could create absolute love in our hearts. We also learned through a cute little photo of her sticking out her tongue that she is funny and sassy. Today we were blessed with four more pictures of new emotions 1)crying for attention 2)happiness when attention is granted 3)sassy smiles that steal your heart and reveal her mischief 4)A desire to give that sassy smile despite heat and humidity that can make you want to sleep.

How much of this am I imagining from just a few photos? Maybe a lot. But I do know that every little piece of information we are receiving is etching a new mark on my heart. What a joy to adopt a toddler! Sweetness of a baby, sassiness and intelligence of an older child. I have always loved this phase in childhood, and I pray that God will grant me every minute of her toddler-hood that he can.

Thank you God for these photos of my daughter-to-be, and thank you with all of my heart to all the families who take the time to take pictures of the children waiting for their forever families and sending them to the waiting families. They are such a blessing in the waiting place.

(If you want to see a photo of our little angel pray with me that we will get a court date soon, and that we will pass court soon, so that I can post them - she must get her sassiness from her mommy!)

Referral!!!!

The day is finally here, our adoption agency found a BEAUTIFUL and tiny 2 year old girl for our family! We just faxed over our acceptance letter today. I'm going totally over the top with printing her picture and putting it all kinds of places....my iphone wall paper, my computer desktop, by my bed.....I just can't get enough of staring at her photo!

We received her referral on Wednesday morning much to the complete and utter shock of myself and Mike. I literally went into shock, shaking, crying, calling Mike, Kevala and my sister and speaking incoherently. I don't think my mind stopped spinning for 24 hours.

We are incredibly overjoyed to be entering a new phase of the adoption process and right now we are trying really hard to be disciplined about taking time to praise God and thank God that we have been given the opportunity to parent an orphan from Africa.

It is both surreal and amazing to be sitting here typing this blog post with a picture right next to me of a little girl who needs a mommy! I always imagined what it would be like to receive a referral and it was nothing like I thought it would be. As Mike said yesterday with a shocked look on his face "you think you can prepare yourself for this day, but you really can't prepare yourself!"

As most of you know we have been spending the last three months preparing ourselves that this day would not come until next year so we were totally unprepared to receive this news on Wednesday - isn't it funny how God continues to turn my "planning time lines" upside down! We were so overwhelmed when we received this referral just under 6 months on the wait list!

I know that many of you will want to know what the next steps look like, and to be honest we don't totally know what the timing will be because there have been some changes in the Ethiopian adoption process but this is the general process we know so far:

1) We now wait for the Ethiopian courts to assign us a court date (probably within 6-8 weeks from now) The Ethiopian courts are closed for a month starting today.

2) Fly to Ethiopia for court, meet our baby, pass court (she is then legally ours but we can't take her home until a US Embassy date) and then fly home

3) wait 6 weeks until we get a US Embassy appointment, fly back to Ethiopia to pick up our baby and bring her home as a US Citizen

5) Hopefully we will have her home by the end of the year, possibly sooner.

I will write more when we know more, this week has been an amazing whirlwind!