Breaking the Silence

I am tired of keeping quiet about it, and thus I am breaking the silence. Over the last month we have been fighting and praying to bring home another precious child along with Micaelyn before it is too late for him. He is 13, and when children turn 14 in China they are no longer eligible for adoption. Unfortunately, there are very few people willing to adopt older children, especially teenage boys. However, we are willing and able to give this boy the love he deserves. We seem like the perfect family for this child in so many ways, and we have the experience in older child adoption that few other families have. The only problem is that our agency NEVER allows families to adopt 2 unrelated children at the same time, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!

However, we cannot let this child be left to spend life as an orphan without a fight, we cannot give up! Over the last several weeks I have written approximately 30,000 words to defend our request to adopt this boy. Every concern the agency has had we have had an answer for. They have admitted we are an "exceptional family" with great experience and well prepared for his adoption. They seem to feel we are a perfect fit for this dear child, and if we were not also adopting our precious Micaelyn the decision would be easy.

However, this is the one rule they have for which they never make exceptions. We were told no one there can ever remember an exception having been made (well, except that the founders, who were truly wonderful people, adopted EIGHT little children at one time!).

We are trying to take encouragement in the fact they are actually considering our request, which is apparently more than they have ever done before. That we haven't yet been told "no" is in and of itself a true miracle from God. However, as they continue to interrogate us further we are getting worn down. We are tired of defending ourselves. What makes it even harder is that Micaelyn's adoption has been put on hold while we continue to wait for them to make a decision. With Chinese New Year in just a couple of weeks, there is almost no chance now of getting our dossier logged in before then. Thus it will be the end of February, at the earliest, before we get our dossier logged in. Were we not waiting for our agency to make a decision we could have already been logged in by now and waiting for the LOA, the official approval from China for us to adopt Micaelyn. It breaks our hearts to know our daughter is growing older while we continue to wait week after week for a decision. She turns 3 next Friday.

We have kept silent over the last month about this because we felt it best to not spread the story over the internet and have the agency find out we were talking about it. However, we were never told we couldn't say anything about it, and I think it's only fair to us and this boy we have as many people as possible praying for the people at our agency to allow us to bring him home. There are many children waiting for families, many with no hope of ever finding a family to love them. They have no hope to ever have a family, love, and a future. However, this child does have hope as long as the agency entrusted by China to find a family for him does not prevent that family from bringing him home.

PLEASE pray for God to work in the hearts of the people at our agency who are against us (not all are against us, some are obviously supportive or we wouldn't have made it this far). Pray they will realize this child is more important than their rule. Pray they will see that many, many families have been formed by parents adopting more than 1 child at a time, and that many orphans became beloved sons and daughters because other agencies understood that just like sometimes more than one child is born into a family at the same time, so too can 2 children be adopted into a family at the same time. Pray they will understand the love we have for another child should not prevent this child from coming home also. Pray they see our experience, our preparation, our strength, our determination, our perseverance, our resilience, and our faith that will allow us to overcome any difficulties we may face in his adoption. Pray they see our love for this child, the love that has led us to fight such a huge battle to bring him home. Pray they will hold true to their vision statement of being "dedicated to carrying out God's plan for every child to have a permanent, loving family." Pray they will allow this boy to have the chance at life he deserves. Please pray!

If you happen to wonder about the child, you can go to the photolisting on the RainbowKids website: www.rainbowkids.com
His child ID is B09-216, and he has a birth date of September 12, 1996. Please take just a moment to go there, look in the eyes of this waiting child, and pray that he does not have to wait anymore.

Waiting...

I would love to be able to share more, but suffice it to say we are praying right now for some major mountains to be moved, and though they aren't all out of the way yet, they are definitely moving! I will post more as soon as I can, and I do intend to get more Christmas pictures added, but right now I'm doing my part to help move these mountains. Some things seem impossible to the world, but nothing is impossible with God! Sometimes common sense tells us to let go, while faith keeps us fighting! It will take a miracle to move all these mountains, but God is quite the expert at miracles! Please pray for a miracle to happen, not for us, but for a precious child!

Christmas pictures

We had such a special Christmas this year. We finally enjoyed a Christmas at home instead of traveling, and though we missed our extended family it was without a doubt a wonderful way to spend Christmas. We had the best Christmas ever enjoying the special time with our children. These are just the pictures from Christmas morning opening presents. The kids got much more this year than they will next year. I had gotten a lot of things for the boys on sale/clearance long before Christmas. Some things I had actually gotten at least 4-5 years ago (long story). I had forgotten about them being stored in the garage, so when I added them it made quite a few presents for the boys to open. We opened one box to find a large spider web inside, no doubt from being stored in the garage when we lived in Florida - ooops, that was a little hard to explain to the little ones! At least there weren't any spiders!

Christmas morning

We had a great Christmas! I have so many Christmas pictures to choose from to post on here! I'll add more later, but for now I'll start with one of each of the kids I took first thing before opening presents.

Christmas Eve

What better way to enjoy Christmas Eve than with a trip to The Christmas Place in Pigeon Forge followed by dinner at the Old Mill Restaurant!












The boys got to open a Christmas Eve present, a big set of building blocks. Caleb loves Legos (and he's really good at building with them for a 5 year old!), and he loves soldiers and rescue vehicles (i.e. firetrucks and ambulances), so he was really excited about this present! Malachi doesn't have the capacity for building that Caleb does, but he's happy just to put a few blocks together and pretend he built something. Eventually he'll figure out how to really build things!