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.