We are excited to share a family journey to adopting a son in 2017. Nancy has agreed to share her adoption story through a series of articles on RainbowKids. Her blog, Ordinary Miracles & The Crazy 9, documents the daily life of parenting a big family. Through her gift of photography and the written word Nancy captures her growing family through the lens of a DSLR camera. Read her first post: It's A Boy! (a.k.a. Why Even is Better Than Odd. Not Really)
On our amazing, wonderful, perfect, crazy-awesome Mexico Christmas vacation, I keep getting distracted. My thoughts travel half-way across the world... to a son I've yet to meet.
I took our annual family pictures a few days ago. The sunset was gorgeous and just being with my family, as Jude said, was the best gift of all. I couldn't agree more. Yet as I was editing those pictures, I came across the photos of all of our kids together, and was reminded that there's one child missing. Our new son, who likely doesn't even know there's someone missing him. And it seemed to be staring me in the face like a glaring commission. This waiting thing apparently isn't something I've very good at.
Patience is not a character trait I've been blessed with. This isn't new information to me. It's something I've known about myself for a long while now. And evidently, even given many opportunities to practice, I'm not getting any better at it.
We're waiting on our LOA for our new son.
Sometimes it feels like every day without him drags by like an eternity.
Today we're on day #56 of waiting for our LOA, and I'm missing him terribly. Worried about all the what if's.
Maybe its because he's not a baby and likely has some idea that he's being adopted, although he may or may not know specifically what that means. I wonder if he really thinks we're coming. I wonder if as the months pass till we get there, if he'll think we forgot about him. Or changed our minds. And those possibilities make me so sad... that this process takes so long while a child waits for the rest of his forever to start.
Just in case you're not steeped in China adoption circles, LOA is short for Letter of Acceptance. It's the official okie dokie from China, saying that they approve us to adopt our son and unite as a family. There's no reason at this point to think that China won't approve us to adopt our sweet boy, but it's a lengthy process of waiting and waiting and waiting... for documents to get filled out, submitted, filed and approved over and over again. We were hoping to travel to get him in March, but April is looking like a more realistic possibility as the days drag on. The adoption process is a continual process of hurry up and get something done only to wait and wait and wait till it's time to hurry up for the next step again.
But one thing is certain, even though our new son has likely has no idea I'm missing him, has probably never celebrated Christmas and probably doesn't even know what it is, this is going to be his last Christmas without a family. Next year he'll be with us forever. And we cannot wait to share our forever, together, with him!
So many boys wait! Click on their names to learn more about Amo, Blake, Eric, Ilin and Ethan,
