The Season of Preparation

Many Many people have been asking this momma to be about the wait now that we know. Is it hard, does it seem long….. so on and so forth. And oddly enough I have complete peace in the waiting to bring her home. Yes, I long to have her in our arms and in our house, but I also know and recognize that it is a process. It has been a long “paper pregnancy” and we can finally say we are in the third trimester.

Nope, I have not thought about what her room would look like. I have not thought about the colors of the curtains, walls, sheets etc. I have been rather busy getting paperwork done. Our immigration paperwork should have reached their hands yesterday. That should take 2-3 weeks if all goes well. And then it comes back to us and off to the Visa Clearing Center, 2-3 weeks and then back to China. That is where we wait for a travel date. If all goes well we could travel as early as middle to late February or sometime in early March. We will have a three week notice and then go time!

We have been busy working on the paperwork, sending her picture out to our family, planning for what life will look like after her arrival and honestly just rejoicing in the fact that we have a face. That we stare at this sweet smile, full of joy, wondering if she knows about her family yet. I wonder what they have told her about us coming, or if they even have. We had the opportunity to put together Hosanna’s first gift as her parents this week which was a photo album of our family along with a small toy. Such a small gift compared to the gifts that she has given us through the adoption process. But it will be the first time she “meets” us. It is amazing to think, this album that I spent hours putting together will be in her hands and she will look at the translation and see that there is a mama and a baba coming to get her. Logically I know that she indeed does not understand one bit the gravity of that. The gravity of being taken from the only “family” she has known in the orphanage into our arms, on to a plane where we get paperwork that says she is ours. Then onto another plane, where she will step foot into her new home, new cat, new room, new things, new family, new life and even new citizenship. Everything about who she is will change in an instant when the dotted line is signed. This concept has been weighing heavy on my heart for her.

I know there will come a time when she will want to know the story that has been written for her. I was praying last week that in some way we could get a hold of some picture of her from before she was two. Just something for her to have that says “your story was long written before you were two”.  We got our package in the mail with all of the next steps, travel info and such, and there on the front cover was an answered prayer, a picture of her from a younger point. I cried….stared and cried. And as I combed through the book, there were more. I think they range from age 12-18 months maybe (totally wild guess) but it is something.

So, while I want her here and want her here now, I know that she is being taken care of.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27

Instead I wrestle with what it will look like when she gets home. We try to contemplate what she might need medically without seeing her. We celebrate her with friends and family and we pray. We pray that she is taken care of, we pray that she knows we are coming and most of all we pray for her to be knit with our hearts in an unexplainable way when we meet.

More to come,

Jennifer

Please be praying for all the paperwork. We are waiting for the green light from the US government to say that we can indeed adopt her. And we are waiting for our homestudy update, which we need soon.