Little details

I was looking at Reece's Rainbow, and I saw on Garnet's little blurb that there were multiple photos available. We had only ever seen one, so I immediately emailed our SW about the others. It turns out there was one other, obviously carelessly taken at the same time as the one that we had already seen. It is more zoomed out, so it was easy to see how tiny she is! It also shows that what I had hoped was a nice crib looks more like a mat on the floor :-(

I pore over the details in her file and look at the two pictures. Her file says she has a "baba" and responds well to touch; I pray that this is preparing her to have a family. Her file says she can't interact with other children given her condition. I get the feeling that she has never been given a chance.
She can hold a toy for a short amount of time... This gives me hope; maybe she isn't totally sensorily deprived? She is learning to eat from a spoon... This is also very good, though there is no discussion of what eating issues she has. I am sure we will be seeing an eating OT when she gets home. I am praying that she will be good at eating (or learning to eat) and that we won't have to do a g-tube or an ng tube, but I have no way of guessing what will actually happen until I get to see her in person.
She appears to have the thickest head of hair! It is amazing, given her extremely low level of nutrition. I am looking forward to letting those dark curls get a little longer!

All of our info is almost a year old, so there is a lot we don't know. I pray that she has progressed, that her baba gives her lots of good contact and input, and that her nutrition is improved. Please join me in asking our great God to protect and preserve our little girl!

A post from Penny's mom

http://zingermama.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-battle-is-now.html


The above address will take you to a great blog post about an urgent situation at Garnet and Penny's orphanage.
Go look, and pray!

Proverbs 3:9,27

Honor the Lord with your wealth

and with the firstfruits of all your produce; 

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,

when it is in your power to do it.

Reece's Rainbow

Every time I learn that I have gotten someone hooked on Reece's Rainbow I get very excited.

It was where we originally saw Garnet's picture, and there are so many others that need families!

It's linked on my sidebar, and if you click *here* you can get to the newly listed children page. Go look at the kids! Pick one out and pray! You never know how God will use you!

:-)

I just wanted to check in and say we had an awesome meeting with our SW today.

Praise God!

Expectations

When I was young, I always tried to imagine what being a "grown-up" would be like. It got a lot easier, I thought, when I met my husband at 15. By the time I was 17, I was sure he was the one. I would daydream about what married life would be like; what it would be like to spend my days with my best friend.

I have a pretty good imagination.

But boy was I ever wrong! It turns out you can't imagine a new relationship. It is too multidimensional and there are too many variables. I didn't really know myself or my future husband. We have been married for nearly 6 years, and it has been nothing like my premarital imaginations. It is SO much more complicated, and SO much better. I am glad my foolish teenage daydreams were only that!

It was a little easier to imagine what it would be like to be a mom; after all, I am the oldest of 8 children and I had a bit of experience with babies. My imagination was more cautious this time; I knew there were a lot of things I didn't know. There was no way I could have predicted what it felt like to hold your very own child, or how intense the love of a mother is. Those things are not like being a big sister!

Now as we look forward to bringing Garnet home (and spending the rest of our lives with her), my imagination wants to do it again. It is informed by the experiences of others, by a few words and photos. I know what it is like to love my son, but I have a feeling that this will be different. There is a lot of uncertainty, even more than when I was contemplating marriage or the delivery of our son. Will she like us? Will she be terrified? Will she sleep well? Will she be able to eat at all? How big will she actually be? What will it be like to hold her in my arms? I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I don't know if she will welcome a relationship with us. I am a mom, but I have never been a mom to someone who has not had a mom for over a decade! There is a lot that I simply can't imagine.

I think that's a good thing. If I had known how hard marriage would be beforehand, I might have chickened out. I might have ignored all the awesome stuff because the hard things seemed like too much. Same with becoming a mom. I am pretty sure that if I had known all the hard things that would happen before I conceived, I would have tried pretty hard to avoid that, too!
So, we know what we need to know. When we need to know more, we will learn more. Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow, and also that all things work together for the good of those who love Him.
I have a hunch that this will be the hardest thing we have done yet, but that it will also bring us closer to Jesus than ever before. That is worth any amount of "hard"!

Mulligan Stew

Adoptive mom and blogger Julia over at Micah 6:8 has the coolest fundraiser going right now.

Her Mulligan Stew is raising funds (through Reece's Rainbow) for a bunch of families who are in the process of adoption, and for a bunch of kids who don't have committed families yet.

She has a whole system set up; there are instructions for how to donate, and tons of prizes. But even though one of the prizes is a mini iPad, they are not the most exciting part of the fundraiser...

The most exciting part is that as the fundraiser has been running, kids from the "no family yet" category keep getting bumped into the "my family found me" category. If you hop over to her blog, most of the recent posts are Mulligan Stew related and tell the cool stories of the families stepping up to love these kids.

www.covenantbuilders.blogspot.com