IT'S A BOY!!!

I had a dream come true this morning, one of the many that will also be coming true very soon.  Early this morning I got a telephone call that woke me and it was our adoption caseworker calling to tell me that we had a baby!  I've always wanted to get a surprise call like that:  "We have a baby for you, he's already born, come pick him up!".  Our baby is in China, so it won't be quite as simple as that but it felt just as amazing, miraculous, surreal, and exciting as you would think it would feel.

So here's the whole story:

A month ago when we decided to really, seriously look at China's waiting child list we sent FTIA (our international adoption agency) the paperwork we would need to initiate an adoption of a special needs child from the waiting list.  One form was a lot like the matching list we had to fill out for LDSFS which litsted a whole bunch of medical conditions and we had to mark if we would accept a child with the specific condition or not.  On the bottom of that form we had to choose if we wanted to pick our child from the waiting list or if we wanted FTIA to use the guidelines we'd marked in that form and pick our child for us.  We marked that we wanted to choose him or her ourselves.

Well, yesterday we noticed that FTIA had received their list of new waiting children for the month.  We looked through the list and sadly weren't able to feel like any of them were right for our family.  "Oh well", I thought.  "Maybe it's going to take longer than I'm hoping for to find our child.  That's ok.  Stay positive.  Another list will be coming out in a month."  Imagine my surprise when this morning I was asleep in bed, Chris had already left for work, and the phone rang waking me up. 

"Hello?"  I said really groggily.  It was obvious that I had just been woken up.

"Hi!  This is Melissa from FTIA (our caseworker who I'm really familiar with as she's practically held my hand through the whole dossier process).  I'm sorry to call you so early, but I didn't think you would mind because I'm calling to tell you that we matched a baby to your family this morning!"

"What?!?!" I am thinking but don't say out loud.  Being the pessimist that I am, my mind automatically starts thinking, "Oh no.  They matched us to someone that isn't right for our family and I'm going to have to tell them no."  I'm feeling this way because Chris and I looked at the new waiting child list yesterday and there wasn't a single child on that list that we felt was right for our family.

"Um.  That's great!"  I try to say sounding more than a little bit bewildered.  "BUT, I thought we marked that we were going to pick our child rather than FTIA matching us to one."

I could hear Melissa shuffling through some papers on her desk, "Hmmm, let me look at your file.  Oh!" a little suprised and disappointed, "that's right!  You did.  Hmmm.  Well, he's all locked in for your family, do you want to hear about him anway?"

"Sure."  I say just waiting to hear about one of the children from yesterday's list that we had already considered and that I was now going to have to heart-breakingly turn away.

"He was born September 23, 2008 - "  that's all I remember of what she said for the next moment or two because I'm thinking, "September of '08?  I know there wasn't a little boy on yesterday's list who was that young."  Melissa went on for a few more seconds telling me things about him that she was going to have to repeat to me, probably several times because I was starting to feel a bit shocked.  "Maybe this is for real!  Maybe he's mine!  Maybe this is the one we've been waiting for!  How is this possible?" I'm thinking, so confused.

"Wait." I tell her.  "Chris and I looked at the list that came out yesterday.  This little boy that you're telling me about wasn't on that list, was he?"

"No.  We did get a new list of waiting children yesterday but there weren't very many children on it so we figured we would get another list  with more children today and we did!"  she says happily.  "He was on the list we got this morning and when I saw him and that he fit the guidelines you were looking for we locked him in for your family because we thought that you had marked for FTIA to match you."

I am flabbergasted at this point.  She continues to tell me about this little boy, and I am so overwhelmed that I am only catching snippets of it here and there.  "It says he's quiet with a ready smile.  He's from the Fujian province.  Oh!  This is good, it says he's a good sleeper." she jokes.  Could this be real?  She goes on to explain what it says about the medical conditions he has.  They are definitely something that Chris and I feel prepared to handle, even in their most extreme condtitions which isn't likely.  Wow.  I even said it out loud, "Wow."  I mutter a bunch of only semi-coherent thoughts to her about emailng me and Chris the file so we can go over it and, "you know, just make sure it's right."  She says she can, and does, and I call Chris totally floored, happy, but numb.  We agree to both say an individual prayer, read through his file, and then he'll call me and we'll talk about it.

As I say my prayer I think about how Heavenly Father already answered my prayer about adopting from China.  Back in the very beginning of this process I prayed and had a very strong spiritual experience where God told me that any way I felt comfortable bringing a child into our home, He would support it.  And then to show how He would support that He put a picture in my mind of our family kneeling at the alter in the temple.  That is how He will endorse this decision of ours, by making an everlasting covenant with our family to make that child ours for eternity.  I think about that answer and I feel good, and I think back to the conference talk that I listened to the day before Megan got married when Sis. Dalton counseled that I needed to live my life in a way that when I needed to I could claim certain blessings from Heavenly Father because of my worthiness.  "Well, this is one of those times." I think, "The blessing of this child is here, available, in front of me and I need to be able to make a decision today, right now."  As I read through his file I can't help but think that there is no reason why this baby couldn't or shouldn't be my son.  Chris calls me after a few minutes and says that when he prayed after having read his file all he could do was "bawl".  He feels good about it too.

And so just like that, that's how you can go to bed with one child and wake up to find that you really have another and that he's living halfway across the world.  Pretty amazing, isn't it?