A Big Day!

We no longer have to feel quite so blue about this adoption process... It feels as thought we have turned a corner and we might now be headed in a forward direction. In the mailbox I found  a letter that we have been waiting for and it made me shake to open it. We received our 

Department of Homeland Security letter that gave us favorable determination for advance processing of orphan petition. In English that means the US government determined upon review of all our paperwork, that we are able to furnish proper care to an orphan or orphans.

This is what the Nepali Ministry has been waiting for in order to move us into the next stage of matching us with a child. Reading the letter made both Bob and I chuckle as we continue to wonder when we will know who SHE is. When will the referral come, when can we plan to know who is intended for our family? The waiting is much more challenging than we thought it would be. Not only because we are eager for her arrival into our family but because we have no control over anything that happens throughout this process. We simply wait. We talk about the next phase of parenthood and just this week I began to show Bob what I would like to do in creating a room for our daughter. Even that felt a bit strange. We learned this week that many areas of Nepal only have electricity for six hours a day so some weeks it is challenging for our agency to be in contact with the attorney who is closely working with the government as the adoptions begin to get rolling in Nepal. So this week there was very little news from our agency. The look on Owen's face above says it all... Some days when well meaning people ask how it is going that is the face I would love to make. Instead today we are smiling. We are smiling because somewhere thousands of miles away our daughter is either already born or soon to be born to a birth mother who will have to make the most courageous choice of her life. Someone recently told me to pray for the birth mother. Pray for her health, her choices, her courage to find the right orphanage where she will leave the child we will someday be blessed to meet.