Quick Adoption Update!

We picked up our offical home study yesterday from our agency and gathered our other paper work needed to send off to Immigration (USCIS, i600a). Basically we are requesting permission from the US Immigration to bring our baby into the country. This approval is required before we can get on the waiting list for our baby. Last night as our oldest daughters slept upstairs we prayed over all our paperwork and blessed the hands that would be recieving it. Then Rainer went out to a 24 hour print and ship store to send it off. We just couldn't wait one more day to be a step closer to Pearl :) I am asked, "What is the next step?" pretty often so I'm going to try and include the blog posts with what's next each step of the way. So, now, we wait on our letter of receipt from USCIS. The approval process can take up to 90 days, and somewhere amidst that time we will receive our appointment for fingerprinting. Our fingerprinting will be done while we await USCIS approval. Once we get our approval, we get to send our dossier to Ethiopia and get on the waiting list. Right now the waiting time for a referral is about 15-18 months. Another question we are asked is, "How can we pray?". First of off, thank you, that blesses us so! We are always praying for our baby, for her caretakers, for our family to be prepared for her, and for her tummy mommy. Specifically right now, We would love your prayers in agreement with us for continued favor in our process. For the USCIS approval to be swift and smooth! So as for our timeline, there is a lot we do not know. We have perimeters we have been told as far as 90 days here, 30 days here, etc. But, what we do know is that God is good, all the time. Our daughter has been chosen for us by him, and WE CANNOT MISS HER! I tell myself that at least 5 times a week, okay maybe 5 times a day. More soon, off to make lunches and get Bitty & Boo ready for school!

What's in a name?

A note on the names around here. Just clarifying something. Our family does nicknames for our girls, they have real, beautiful, southern names. But 've decided only to call them by their nicknames on our blog. I want to share our family, share this journey, but sharing only nicknames feels safe, yet still personal... Ok back to the name. We affectionately call our new baby, Pearl. Many people have asked me "Will you call her Pearl?" We know part of Pearl's real name, and we are thrilled to be naming her after Rainer's grandmother and I love thinking about the day she will meet her namesake, but we will wait to learn her given name to know her full name.  God's love is so in the details, and in His goodness He has given us this sweet nickname to call our baby. Nickname does not sound near grand enough. Can I call them love-names?  Anyways, let me explain. We have prayed about adoption for years. When we really began to press in and seek an answer or confirmation from God about our third child I asked God to make it abundantly clear who this baby would be. Girl or boy, biological or adopted. I believe God is a relational God, who speaks and guides us. So I talk to Him often and have developed a faithful expectation that He will answer. If you think I'm crazy, you should just try it.  He delights in fellowship with us, and He is always speaking, we just have to listen.  We prayed, we worshiped and we waited in expectation of what He would reveal, knowing that, as Rainer reminds me often, God is good all the time. Well speak he did! I was in a powerful place of worship in November of 2011.( It was November 19th to be exact, a historic day for us always, as its our dating anniversary and the day we got engaged) God spoke to me and showed me the most beautiful picture of a perfect pearl seated safely in an oyster shell. A symbol of my daughter, a jewel of great worth who would be discovered. A jewel who's beauty is known first by its finder, possibly admist the muck, where others might have overlooked. A jewel that I would know as mine, that we would be the ones to discover and draw out her beauty. He would keep her safe and nuture her, until we could. I wept in joy, amazed that God would call us to adoption and toppled over with thankfulness that I knew, that I knew that I knew our third daughter was coming not from my womb, but from the other side of the world.  I told Rainer that I had heard something about our child and asked him to pray and let God confirm and tell him the same thing he had told me. He shortly heard that we would name our daughter after his grandmother....His grandmother's name, so just happened to in some translations mean Pearl.  Now that is God's beauty in the details. So, Pearl she is, our sweet, completely unique, formed like no other, Pearl. A rare beauty, a pillar of strength and wisdom.  In the following months as God worked to show us His timing for our adoption I read more and more about Pearls in the bible. Did you know that the gates of Heaven are made of a single pearl? That is the worth and value He has placed in my youngest daughter! She is His pearl, a symbol of the always open gates of Heaven, given to us, bringing joy and healing to this earth. And I get to be her mama? Whoa, humility.  For this mama she is truly a jewel in my crown. A piece of heaven to me. 

Loving Her

When I have carried my oldest two daughters in my tummy, I have loved the process of falling in love with them.  Dreaming of who they would be and feeling their movements, and watching my body change and grow all to provide a home for them was a beautiful season in my life. The preparation for this baby has been so different, yet so similar. I am watching my spirit and my soul change and grow to prepare a place for our baby. I am falling in love with my baby. I am not feeling her movements inside my tummy, but I am experiencing the knitting of her heart in mine. Truly, she is like God promises to ALL mothers, adoptive and biological, He knits our children together in the inmost of our beings. I am falling in love with her and its beautiful.  In the beauty of that, I am also falling in love with an amazing family, birth mother and country.  As I learn about Ethipioa, and its beautiful history it feels so confirming to us. She has always been our baby, before the foundation of the earth. Reading about the history has been exciting. Many people have told us of Africian's people great and unexplainable joy. That their smiles are like no others, and the strength of their faith a true miracle.  We believing our baby has an amazing inheritance of joy and we are experiencing that already in our preparation for her.  I am falling in love with and find myself wondering often of her family, of who her caretakers will be. I pray often for the hands that will first hold her, that will bathe her, learn and meet her needs. I bless them and I love them. Then there is her. The beautiful woman who is fulfulling her destiny and answering a call to carry and birth our baby. My love for her is irrational and unexpressionable.  I feel so protective and so connected to a woman I may never meet this side of heaven. She is amazing, strong, smart and I know how much she loves this baby. I know because I share in her great love for our baby. We spend a lot of time at our house praying for Pearl and Pearl's "tummy mommy". Bitty had a lot of questions about the woman who would carry Pearl in her tummy. It was important to her that I referred only to myself as Pearl's mommy. She so sweetly asked me if I would be the one to carry Pearl on my hip, to dance with her, pray for her and to kiss her boo-boos. When I answered yes, she said simply, "Ok so if that's you and she is in our family, then you are her mommy". So in honoring Pearl's birth mother we spoke about her courage and how God was forming our baby in the tummy of a princess in Africa who would birth our baby.  Bitty told me that we could call her, Pearl's tummy mommy.  Works for me. That night she wanted to pray for her and said "God, please help Pearl's tummy mommy be proud of her baby". What discernment this precious child of mine has. Since then her prayers have been so beautiful and so dead-on.  Prayers like...Let her not be scared, let her laugh, Heal her cough-es, let her know how much we love Pearl! Such truth and such love. My prayers are so similar, and my love for Pearl's tummy mommy is vast.  Thank you Lord for creating her in the delicate, yet powerful ways you have, that she may gracefully gift us our Pearl. That she and I will always share the depths of knowlege of the beauty of our daughter and the joy that she has imparted to her mommies. 

Homestudy...almost done!

Where I've been, well thats all over the place, yet somehow focused, steady and secure. Our homestudy is nearly complete and we have had hours of beautiful, searching converstations with each other, with God and with our social worker about our adoption and About our love and surness (thats probably not a word, but while I'm here I'm just going to pause and say if you do not love run-on sentences, un-needed commas/adjectives, etc then you should probably stop reading my blog now :) - my heart is be transparent and overflowing in His goodness and my heart, thus perfect grammar and actual non-made up words may just not suffice for some posts.) See, I told you like run-on sentences?  Anyways, back on track.  My absence in blogging has been simply my presence in our home study. The hours spent writing our autobipgraphies and in meetings and discussions examing our family structure, history, beliefs and desires have been so well spent. We are more sure than ever of our daughter waiting for us, in His perfect time, in Africa. We've had the priviledge of really surveying the years we each spent under the roofs of our parents, and been able to see what strengths and joys we have brought from those homes into our owns. In the busy season of stewarding young children I feel grateful to have had the oppurtunity to see our parents in a whole new light. To appreciate the hours they spent as we saw it, carpooling, cooking, cleaning, listenting, teaching, traveling, cheering, laughing, praying, deciding, leading...all the many, many hours they invested in us, we now see each task less literal, and more for what their heart was in each measure of love for us. In each season the way they provided for us, patiently stewarding us, they were watching and waiting to see the people emerge as who God destined them to be. They were speaking our identity into us and preparing us for the destinies God had planned. I have been overwhelmed with gratitude for Rainer's parents and sisters, for their understanding and expectation of the man they always new he would be. And as I now sit here seeing first hand the work God has done in him, making him the person  that has surpassed all of our dreams and notions of the man he would become. My heart is full.  The process thus far has also been such a confirmation of our heart for our daughter and for adoption as a whole. My heart is growing, and expanding in ways I never knew possible. A blog I read recently talked of the love an adoptive mother has for her child and specifcally the love that preceeds sight. That love that keeps you moving towards your precious child. A child that is changing your life, your family and your world before you've touched her fingers. This baby is changing my heart and my eyes to view this world in trully heavenly ways.  To our sweet baby, we love you. Lately I've honestly felt crazy for you, like the change in season to spring everyone is longing for, I'm seeing hints of blossoms and feeling fresh warm breeze and a hint of what is to come, and I'm thinking of you. Thinking of all the unexpressible feelings of joy and longing for you I experience. I am rejoicing in hearing your sisters laughter in our home, knowing that your laugh will multiply our joy. Knowing that a hint of a change in season brings hope and renewal, with a tinge of longing. Your life will be a forever breath of fresh air and sign of hope and renewal to our family. You are not even here yet, but your presence in our hearts is sprouting beautiful blossoms. We are growing, we are loving you, we are running as fast as we can to scoop you up and trusting in God's perfect timing.