Saturday, October 11, 2014

The Journey to Our Daughter



We brought our son home from Hong Kong a little over a year ago.  Not long after he came home we started talking about when to start the adoption process again.  At the beginning of his adoption we knew we would adopt twice, because we wanted our adopted child to have that connection with someone else in the family.  We played the name game, throwing out names for our next child.  For the sake of privacy I'll say we settled on the name Sarah for a girl.  Not long after that the adoption agency posted the profiles of 14 children in China with Down syndrome needing families. One little girl was Sarah.  We told our kids about the children and we all prayed together to ask God to bring families for these kids.  Our second son asked if we could be one of those families.  We wondered the same thing so we started looking into adopting Sarah.  At first it looked like it might work out, but soon realized that the door was closed to us for the time being. (In this past year every one of these kids have been taken off the waiting child list as families have started the adoption process to bring them home).  At that point we decided to give our family six months to transition with a new child at home and then revisit the idea to decide of starting the adoption paperwork again.  Mid-January came and I felt like I was to pray for Sarah because someone from our agency would call to ask us to adopt her.  I thought this was just me being a little crazy.  Stuff like that doesn't happen often and it certainly doesn't happen to us, right?  But, I continued to feel like I should pray for Sarah so for the next two weeks I prayed for her, for her family and that God would prepare us if we were to adopt her.  The end of January we talked about adopting again and decided that since international adoption would take a year or more we would go ahead and start the paperwork.  The next day our social worker from the adoption agency contacted us about a baby due in the States with DS and the family was considering adoption.  Our social worker wanted to know if we would be willing to be considered as a placement for the baby if needed.  After finding out we could easily switch from a domestic home study back to an int'l one if they decided to parent, we went ahead to complete the domestic home study.  That situation did not work out for us and come summer time we didn't feel quite ready for all the paperwork that would be coming for the int'l adoption process so we registered with the National Down Syndrome Adoption Network with the plan that we would go back to int'l adoption in the fall or winter.  The NDSAN called several times about different children, but other families were chosen to adopt.  It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster and I was figuring out that we needed to try to stay emotionally detached from these potential placements in the beginning.

Every year I take pictures of our kids at the end of summer. After taking our daughter's pictures we looked back at her photos from past years.  She kept asking about where her clothes were that she wore in them.  When I told her she had grown too big for them and they were in a box she said "Mommy, we need a new sister so she can wear my clothes."  I told her she could pray about it without thinking much of it.  A week later our social worker called.  They had a baby girl in the NICU with DS that needed a family, would we like our profile shown.  I said yes and when my husband got home that Tuesday evening I asked if he wanted to hear the latest situation that probably wouldn't work out.  We talked a little about how we would travel and arrange things at home, but didn't expect much.  Wednesday morning I was on a field trip with our kids when the social worker called back.  We had been chosen as her family!  It felt surreal as we arranged travel plans and child care.  I flew out on Sunday to be with her.  She ended up being in the NICU for just under a month and I was with her for 3 weeks.  She was released with an NG tube for feeding, but otherwise seems healthy.  Had you asked us last year if we would adopt an infant domestically we would have thought it unlikely, but God had other plans and we now have our beautiful daughter home with us.

On this side of the adoption, it's fun to see how God has been preparing us to bring her home.  1. At the beginning of our son's adoption we had to fill out a form about what medical conditions we were comfortable with.  It's not a fun process, because we knew that every time we said NO, we weren't saying no to a condition, but to a child that needed a family.  One of the things I said no to was feeding tubes.  NG tubes, G tubes, I didn't care.  It all sounded a little too scary to me.  Fast forward to the beginning of this summer and we heard about a baby girl that had some medical conditions requiring G tube feeding.  I asked some other moms that had adopted kids from Hong Kong with feeding tubes and their responses were very similar.  Once you get used to the feedings, it's really no big deal.  Another family was chosen for that little girl, but I was now much more comfortable with the idea of a feeding tube.  2. Since we were registered with the NDSAN we saved the money they recommended for an adoption, but we neglected to save for traveling expenses.  Last spring we decided we'd like to get a little used car as a second car, so we saved up for that.  The end of August we decided that a second car was a luxury and not a necessity, so we planned to send the money to pay down student loans.  I had written the check and was getting ready to send it when we found out about Sarah.  I decided to wait a day to see if we were chosen or not.  Once we were chosen I kept the check and we used the money to pay for her adoption.  The additional fees and traveling expenses totaled up to just a couple hundred dollars more than what we had saved for the car.  3. Another situation came up where we would have had to leave about 3 days later to get the baby.  We made a tentative plan, called my parents to find out if they could help out on such short notice and then found out that once again another family had been chosen.  When our social worker called about showing our profile for our baby girl saying that one of the requirements the agency had was that one parent be able to travel quickly to stay with her in the NICU, we already had a plan in place to make that happen.  Had my mom not been able to stay with the other kids on short notice, making it possible for me to travel quickly and stay for three weeks, the social workers would have looked for another family.  These are just a few of the things we've seen over the summer that God has used in getting us ready for her.  In the midst of disappointments He was preparing us for our daughter.