I didn't get to blog yesterday because I was traveling between Des Moines, Iowa and Paris, Texas... but I did want to announce that my beautiful daughter Alice turned nine years old yesterday. She is my middle child (Martha is 10, Isaac is 5) and is a literal angel. She joined our family when she was 20 months old; she was born in Seoul, South Korea. She suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury when she was about 11 months old and has some significant physical, developmental and learning issues as a result... but I cannot possibly imagine life without her.
Back in the mid-90s, when my husband and I moved to Iowa from Texas, we had a two-year-old daughter who we had adopted at birth. We wanted to do it again, so we began the application process to adopt internationally through Holt International Children's Services. We were dirt-poor, but we really did believe that God wanted us to go ahead with this. We were able to come up with the initial application fee, and began filling out the forms. One of the forms was distressing to me, however -- it was a checklist of disabilities and/or birth defects that we would be willing to accept in a child. Now, this is standard for adoption agencies, I'm sure, but what bothered me was that I couldn't bring myself to say "no" to any of these. Some of them were particularly frightening to me, but I knew that if God had given us a child by birth with any of these issues, I wouldn't turn Him down. I sat on the application for several days, praying and stewing. Finally I talked to Rick about it and shared my dilemma with him. He completely agreed with me. So we sent the application in as it was, indicating that we'd accept anything on the list... and then we took a deep breath.
I found out later that the agency had called one of our reference families (a family who was already in the adoption process themselves and who knew us very well) to ask if we were "for real" concerning this. My friend assured them that we were.
The one hold-up? We didn't have the $900 it would cost to process our home study. Rick and I don't really "do" debt, per se, and believed that if God wanted us to have a child, the money would arrive. It always did, for things like that, and so we told the agency to hang onto our application indefinitely until God provided the next sum of money.
A few months later, the agency called us. Apparently they had a little girl, about a year and a half old, from Korea. She was already in the U.S. and her placement hadn't worked out, so she was in a foster home here and awaiting a new placement. Her health was unclear, but her MRI scans looked daunting and there would be no guarantees that she would ever be able to walk, talk, learn, etc. If we'd please take her medical records with us to a pediatrician and discuss her future and our ability to care for her, would we consider adopting her?
Rick and I told them that of course we would, but that we still didn't have the fee they required.
They waived everything. This little girl needed a home, and soon.
Within a month, after we had visited her a few times in her foster home nearby, we brought her home for good.
She was three before she walked, but she DID walk. Now she can even RUN. Okay, it's a little lopsided, but by golly, she can do it.
She was also three before she could talk, but with the help of the most diligent speech pathologist I've ever known, she can now speak with complete clarity.
She's learned to read... slowly... and she's working hard to learn to write.
The most amazing thing about Alice is her nature, her temperament. She is sunshine personified... no-one who meets her is ever the same. At church, she specifically seeks out people who are visiting or are new, and she speaks to them and offers to show them a place to sit. She seems to sense when someone needs encouragement, and she pats their hand or smiles and talks to them.
My little girl is a very gentle soul. She's nine, and she may never be older than that inside, but if I had to have a child who lived with me for her entire life, I would want it to be her.
Thanks, God. You knew what you were doing... as usual. : )
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