Cheaper by the dozen

There is a lot of back story that has been going on around here that I am now able to fill you all in on.

As you know, about a year ago, I first became aware of a little girl who looked as though she has the same special need as H. and who needed a family. I was absolutely jolted by her from the moment I saw her and felt a strong connection even though I knew at that moment it was an impossibility that we bring her home. There were oh, so many reasons why it wouldn't work out. Yet God is far, far bigger than any problems that we can seen and you've known for a while now that we have Pre-Approval for this little girl.

(Tina will now have an official blog initial and will from now on be known as R.)

This is where the craziness quotient begins to become significantly increased. You see, at about the same time that I saw R.'s picture, I also saw the picture of another little girl who also needed a family. This in itself is not unusual, there are hundreds of children being advocated for on social media sites every day. What was different was that I felt that same jolt upon seeing this child's picture as I did for R.'s (and for H.'s). It was an immediate and intuitive sense that this was my child even though I knew nothing about her and there was no way we could bring her home.

And so life went on. I would check on her daily to see if she was still available and she was. This itself was a bit odd. She was female, she was mobile, she was cute. Often children with this combination of things going for them find a family rather quickly. Yet there she sat waiting and waiting. In the meantime we learned about R.'s grant and decided to move forward. Surely this little girl could not also be our daughter because we committed to another child.

A strange and outlandish plan began to hatch in my brain. If we are already in country for one child, then the costs would be slightly less to adopt a second one. There would still be a lot of hurdles to get over, but the idea was planted. Our social worker was on board and after much debate we decided to go ahead and ask to be approved to adopt two children on our home study. This was sheer insanity given our family size and IL's reputation. We knew that there was always the possibility that we would have to reduce to the number to just one because we weren't going to jeopardize R.'s adoption. This explains somewhat my all out letter writing effort to get our home study approved as written. I didn't want to have to leave this other little girl behind but we also weren't going to lock-in her file before we had approval because it was risky. We didn't want her to miss a chance of having a family if someone else was going to step forward before we had all our approvals in order. Besides, even if we did get the approval from IL, there was no guarantee that we would get the approval from her country.

Receiving our home study approval was not without it's own stress and drama. I felt as though it was doubly hard because the future's of two little girls hung in the balance. Unbelievably we were approved... and approved for two... without having to go through any additional hoops. We were finally free to ask for permission to adopt the little girl I could only dream about a year ago.

God has moved mountains and I am thrilled to announce that when we finally get to travel, we will be travelling to bring home two daughters. You've already met R., now I'd like to introduce you to Y..

This is the picture of her when I first fell in love.

Here is a more recent one. She is 8, almost exactly one year younger than K.

We are humbled at what God has done. We are feeling as though we are more than a little bit crazy. We have no idea how God will manage to work out the details of the rest of the unknowns. It all feels exciting, overwhelming, scary, and wonderful all at the same time. 

It is amazing the paths God will lead you down when you are willing to say yes.