Today is L's 4th birthday! She was SO excited this morning when I told her that today was finally her birthday! (She started thinking every day was her birthday more than a month ago and finally decided her birthday would never come because I had to say no so often) Of course, this poor child will have to wait to have her party again this year. Last year, she was sick the day of her party so it had to be postponed nearly a month! This year, I still haven't received my package with everything I needed to make her invitations. (Thanks, Hurricane Irene for assisting with that, BTW!) She and N will probably have a joint birthday party. She wanted Minnie Mouse and fortunately I went with a gender neutral scheme of red with white dots. I can easily modify it for Mickey/Minnie and they can both have a fantastic party! L will not want to share the spotlight, but N will be happy with balloons and cake, so he won't take much more than he would if it was just her party anyways. I'm hoping my package arrives soon so I can get crafting! :-)
In perhaps my favorite news of all, we started the process of adopting a little girl!! I found her while browsing through the waiting children lists that I look through. It was love at first sight! Except that she's in C, the country we were told we can't adopt from. I tried to move on and I thought I had moved on, but God told me that we needed to get her. He reminded me of the parable of the lost sheep and basically said that we should do whatever it took, even if that meant I would have to move back to the states for the process leaving D behind. DJ, L, & N would probably come with me, though I hated the idea of taking DJ & L out of Kindergarten and having them forever lag in German because of it. So, there was the possibility of my taking only N and leaving DJ & L with D. As I emailed my agency contacts, I was not getting great responses. D would have to be with us in the states for the entire homestudy process (which is much longer than he could manage). The timeframe of adoption was often cited as being between 14 months and 2 years before I would be able to come back home. But that is too long for a family to be split up. I hated the idea of sacrificing my family and my 3 kids for 1 little girl. It didn't seem right. But, God kept nudging. Torn between doing the "obvious" thing and obeying God against what made sense, I finally got the email I had hoped for! My preferred agency said that we could do our homestudy here as long as the agency who performs it is 100% Hague accredited. Easy!! I have 2 options for that! So, we have submitted our application to them, received the little girl's file, and accepted her as our "referral". I'm not exactly sure what extra steps we will have to take to make this work with Germany, but I'm willing to do it! I'm assuming it will involved a trip to the states while we wait for things to be finalized before we can bring her home. Once she is a US citizen and has a US passport, I don't think Germany can do much about it. I hope! All I know is that God has made it very clear that she is meant to be our daughter. If Germany tries to stand in the way, they will have a very angry "momma bear" and an infinitely bigger "Papa bear" to recon with.
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