The road to Caleb (part one)

Life is getting ready to change drastically for our family. Sure, there's the obvious ~ we're adding a second child to the mix. The sea of pink, Hello Kitty, and girly flip flops is about to have blue, Thomas the Train, and grass stained sneakers added! But the change doesn't stop there and before I get around to the current, I feel that I have to go back a bit and establish the beginning...

So many folks were shocked at how quickly we got a referral (trust me, so were we!) and on top of that that we had a son! We were blessed beyond measure when we opened our hearts and minds to God's call is the short version. For those that want to know more, here it goes!

We were so intensely in love with Kylie that back in August of last year (Wowzers ~ on the 29th of this month it will have been a year since we applied again to our agency) just after our six month mark we began this journey again. Our dossier proved to be quite tedious this time and as we were wrapping up the seven month process we began preparing our hearts for a three year wait for a referral.

And then the subtle messages began. One night in January I had a dream that Ian and I were in China with Kylie to meet our second child. When our daughter was placed in my arms I barely noticed that she had an unrepaired cleft lip and palate. We were overjoyed at the blessing of a second child and the cleft lip didn't bother me. The next morning I found that strange as I had never considered adopting a child that wasn't in the so called "healthy child" program. I passed that dream off and didn't say a thing to Ian about it. A week or so later I dreamed that we were again in China to meet our second child and this time it was a son that was placed in my arms. He was beautiful and I noticed that he had a huge scar down his chest and I knew that it meant he had already had open heart surgery for a heart defect. I woke up still excited about how real it had felt to hold my son the next morning but again kept my thoughts to myself. The very next day my co-teacher at preschool and I were talking about managing large families and she randomly shared with me that one of her children was born with club feet and through the casting procedure his feet were "repaired" so well that he was accepted into the military. Her sharing that information with me was the signal that I needed to start talking to Ian about the Waiting Child program because all three of the conditions are "special needs" that commonly come up in the WC program. As it turned out, Ian had been having some thoughts about the WC program himself and we decided to talk about it over dinner the next night. Independently that day we began doing research on many of the conditions ranging from the minor ~ like birthmarks ~ to the more severe ~ like cerebral palsy. Together we considered our knowledge, our resources, and our faith in God. Halfway through our Orange Beef and Chicken Chow Mein, we decided that God had been giving us subtle messages to open our hearts. So we got home from dinner and applied online to America World's Waiting Child Program.

Our dossier finally left the US the week of my 35th birthday and we had no idea how being in the WC program would affect our wait. We realized that a referral for a child of either sex within our age range and the conditions we had said we were ready to face could come to our agency any day, or we could end up waiting the full time for a referral from the healthy program. As a person who likes to know what's coming around the bend, I wasn't thrilled about the lack of control in timing, but I suppose that was (and continues to be) part of what God wanted to teach me. My timing is human and therefore faulted, HIS timing is divine and therefore perfect...