Where to begin??

When thinking back over the last 9.5 months, (well, eleven years, I guess), it is hard to know how to begin telling our story.  God has done so many amazing things to bring us to this point in our adoption journey.  It all really began in the summer of 2000 with a little girl named Anne.  I met Anne in an orphanage on the outskirts of Beijing, China.  She was this beautiful little girl, maybe 10 or 11 years old.   I immediately fell in love with her, and it was at that moment God put adoption in my heart.  I remember thinking, "Why is she here?  Why is she on orphan? Why hasn't someone adopted her?".

Fast forward ten years.  Here we were ten years later, with four beautiful boys, going crazy taking care of them, trying to run a food business, and doing life in general.  I had been wrestling with the thoughts about adoption at that time, wondering why we never felt God telling us to go.  I went through the whole gamut of laying everything down-"Okay, God, if You want us to adopt, it doesn't have to be China."  "Okay God, if You want us to adopt, it doesn't have to be a baby."  Okay God, if You want us to adopt, it doesn't even have to be a girl."  Finally, I laid it all down, coming to a place of complete peace that maybe I had misunderstood the call.  Maybe He didn't have another child for us to add to our family through adoption, and that was okay.  I was completely satisfied with my precious family.  Maybe that was what He was waiting for.  Maybe He was just waiting for me to lay it all down, I don't know, but that is when we finally got the call.  We were at Steven Curtis Chapman concert on Friday, November 12, 2010, when He finally spoke to our hearts that He did indeed have a child for us.  Talk about the tears flowing.  So two days later, unbeknownst to anyone but the Lord, we began the paperwork for adoption, still not sure exactly where He was calling us to adopt.  Two weeks later, as I sat praying for God to give us clear direction on the child He wanted us to pursue, He used my sweet Gabriel to make it clear.  Although we had talked about adopting so many times over the years, it had been a while since we had brought it up, but that day, at the moment I was desperate for direction, Gabriel asked, "Mommy, when are we going to get our baby sister from China?"  God couldn't have made it any clearer.  So it was on that day, Wednesday, November 24, 2010, (which happened to be the day before Thanksgiving) that we knew God did indeed have a baby girl from China for us.  On August 26th, 2011, 9.5 months after God conceive her in our hearts, we finally delivered our dossier (adoption paperwork) to the FedEx mail box.  They don't call it a paper pregnancy for nothin'!  Now we wait for that magic Log-In-Date, which is the date that China receives our dossier.  Once we get that date, we are officially in the program and on our way to being matched with our daughter!