Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sunday Recap

I love Sundays, not just a little bit.  I seriously love Sundays.  It is a day when our family doesn't work or shop and it is so nice.  We can relax and spend time together without a to-do list interfering.  There is always Monday for things to get done:)  I love spending time with my family.  I am a stay home mom who home schools so I spend a lot of time with my children and we spend a lot of family time together, but Sundays just are different, they are more peaceful.

Sundays are a day for me to center and reflect on things in my life.  This year, I have reflected a lot on how extremely blessed I am.  I have a house to live in, I have enough food to eat, my house has heat, I have furniture to sit on, I have clothes to wear, I am healthy, and mostly I have a family to love.  These things have become such gifts to be grateful for, not that I wasn't before, but now even more so.  I may not have the nicest, or the biggest, or the newest, but I have them and I am so grateful because I know that there are many people in the world who do not.  I love my family.  I have a wonderful husband.  We enjoy life together.  He is such a good match for me; we are different in so many ways and we complement each other.  We have four fantastic sons.  They make life fun.  They have good hearts.  They are growing into wonderful young men.   I feel extremely blessed to get to be at home with them and know them so well.  I am grateful to be adopting.  It is something that has been on my heart for a long time.  A lot of years worth's of prayers have been said to be at this point and I am grateful.

We are getting so very close to the end of this adoption process and it is so amazing to look back.  We saw Min in November,  had our pediatrician review her file, went over medical options and prayed.  We sent in our Letter of Intent to adopt her at the very end of November and received preapproval 11-30.  We scheduled our physicals, the earliest appointments were in January and we thought that was great since it would be after the holidays.  Then we had a cardiologist look at Min's file.  He was not anywhere as optimistic as our pediatrician and from then on we have worked so hard to get through the process of adopting as fast as we could, and we have been so blessed.  Our homestudy writer finished the visits in one week, and wrote the homestudy quickly.  We were able to expedite the I800A process and were able to fly to Anchorage and walk in for our fingerprints and be approved the next morning by USCIS.  We had our dossier to China 4-15 and were logged in 4-29.  Our agency has a great waiting child coordinator and she monitored our dossier and requested it be expedited multiple times.  We had our LOA 6-3, it was expedited.  Our I800 was expedited it was approved 6/13 and the NVC cable letter was received 6/17.  It was dropped off to the US Consulate  on Tuesday 6/21.  I look over the past 6 months and see God's hand everywhere.

In the midst of all of the adoption process, which I will admit to having spent an inordinate amount of time researching and educating myself, trying to find ways to shave off any amount of time from the process, my husband got extremely sick and was a step away from respiratory failure, he is normally an extremely healthy guy and it came on extremely quickly.  It took him a couple months to get better and he was under doctor's orders not to get sick....:)  We had my 8 year old son's baptism so we got to have a lot of family come visit which was fun.  We have had swim meets, and play performances, scout advancements, and I have worked three different temporary part time jobs.  I had a mole removal that came back fast growth cells and so had to get more removed.  We moved into a fixer-upper last fall and have worked on a ton of home improvement projects. We have just had life happen, but the peace I have felt has overridden any stress or  pressure about other things.

I am amazed at the way this adoption has changed my heart.  Life is such a gift.  We are so very blessed.  God loves us and is very aware of where we are in our lives.  He hears and answers our prayers.  If we look we can see Him carrying or guiding or blessing our lives all the time.

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