How You Can Give One to Save One!

We are the featured family this week on the Give One Save One adoption advocacy website. Please check out our new video over at GIVEONESAVEONE and read more about how you can help us this week.

Most importantly: SPREAD THE WORD!

Use the GIVEONESAVEONE link to post to Twitter, Facebook, your blog, EVERYWHERE! The more people who know, the more people can be part of our story too!

(Go ahead, be a little obnoxious…believe us, our daughter’s adorable face is worth the trouble!!)

GIVEONESAVEONE encourages each of its readers to donate $1 to their weekly featured family. The idea is that if each of us gives $1, we together make a big difference.

The donations are tax deductible and go directly to our agency.

Want to help?

Check out GIVEONESAVEONE this week (starting today, March 31st).

Share the address with your friends and family to see if they’d like to give $1 too.

We hope you enjoy the new video we have posted today!

(We know you are really going to like it!)

(An extra challenge to consider: what if we each gave $1 everyday for 1 week? That would make an even bigger difference to a little girl who has never known a family!)

What a Fisher Price ride on toy says about a little girl

Tonight, Rob and I sat at the dinner table and watched a video of Lucy taken in the play room on the top floor of her orphanage. Lucy is on one of those Fisher Price ride on toys for toddlers.  It is pink and reminds me of the Barbie ride on that Julia had when she was about two years old.  From the side of the video, you can see an adult arm and hand motioning for Lucy to come over, and you can hear a woman’s voice speaking to her in Albanian.  However, the woman is out of the video camera’s range.  Lucy cautiously pushes over to the woman but stops several feet short of going to her. Lucy’s face is serious as if she is thinking about what she wants to do next or possibly not do.  After a few seconds, Lucy begins to back her Fisher Price ride on toy up and makes her decision.  She continues backing up slowly, keeping her eyes on the woman, and then ultimately she turns the toy around and pushes clear to the other side of the play room before looking back.

After Rob and I finished watching the video, Rob began to chuckle and looked over at me and said, “Boy, are we in trouble.” He was referring to the serious face Lucy had been giving the woman and then Lucy’s apparent defiance by pushing away when the woman was obviously motioning for her to come.  We definitely saw a little stubbornness in Lucy’s eyes, but it made us both happy.  Lucy felt comfortable enough to not do what she was being asked to do. I liked seeing that in my daughter.  Some people call it having a strong will. My grandmother called it having gumption. One of the missionaries who works with children at the orphanage said to me that Lucy when she became comfortable with a person was very adamant about what she did and did not want. Whatever you call it, it has probably served its purpose for Lucy as she has lived in the orphanage.

What else did I notice in the video that we ended up watching at least three times in a row? I noticed how small her hands were.  I noticed how big her brown eyes were and that yes, she did have some of the longest eyelashes I had ever seen on a child as another adoptive mom had told me who met Lucy last year.  I noticed how curly her dark brown hair was and wondered what it would look like if I let it grow long instead of the short cropped cut that she has now.  I noticed how fast and capable she was on the Fisher Price ride on, which was completely opposite of her brother at that age.  I noticed her tiny little mouth and remembered that several people told me that she loved to sing.  I wondered if I would get the chance to hear her soon.

And, then it happened.  I noticed how my heart began to ache at the very sight of her.  This incredible longing to hold my daughter for the first time, and all of the emotions that moment brings began to quell up inside of me.  It was a feeling that was bittersweet and familiar.  I remembered having those feelings before our first trip to meet Yuli and living with them every day of the six months between our first trip and our final pick up trip for our son.  It seemed as if every day was an emotional roller coaster as we waited for those final travel dates to be with our little boy forever.

With Lucy’s adoption, I have tried to keep myself busy with the tasks of first completing our home study and now finishing our dossier. Of course, I am also working full-time and raising two other children while we wait.  But, there are moments when I let my heart and my mind go to that place where I am enveloped with thoughts of my daughter. I let myself dream about our first meeting, touching her face for the first time, holding her tiny hand in mine, and carrying her on my back down the streets of Albania  in the Ergo.  I want to know what look she will give me the first time she sees me.  I want to tell her “Te dua” (I love you).  These are times when I let myself feel the longing of making our family whole, and I let myself feel the emotion that brings at full strength.  These are the times when the waiting is hard…so very hard.

In those moments, all I can do is remember that our trip to meet Lucy will be in God’s timing, and I must accept that and trust in His timing.  It does not mean that I cannot long to be with my daughter.  It means that I can take solace in knowing that today we are one day closer to making that happen.

A little update

This last week has been extremely busy for our family.  We are gathering documents for our dossier, and then we are going through the process of getting the documents notarized, certified and apostilled.  We are trying to get all the tasks completed for the dossier so that when our I-800 approval arrives we will be ready to send the entire dossier packet to Albania.

Some of the documents on the dossier are easy to acquire while others are more difficult and time consuming.  I think the one that will be difficult this time will be the updated medicals for both me, Rob and the kids. We all had physicals last year for our home study, but our insurance will not pay for any more physicals for us or the kids until a calendar year has passed since the previous medicals were done. The calendar year will not be up until June.  Just to take the kids to the pediatrician to have a physical and the required TB testing done again will be $600 out of pocket.

I did manage, however, to set up an appointment for Rob and myself. I will just need the TB testing, HIV testing, and drug screen done, because I recently had an office visit with my physician.  Rob will be getting what is called a combat physical, which will be coded as an office visit, and he will also have to have the same testing as I do. Then we will need to coordinate with the doctor to make sure that the notary is there when the paperwork is filled out. Oh, and I did I mention that there cannot be any mistakes or white-outs on the paperwork? It is just standard procedure for an international adoption.

Sometimes, the amount of stuff that we have to do and the amount of money that we have to raise for the adoption overwhelms me, but then all I have to do is pull out Lucy's picture or play one of her videos and the strength to finish this starts pulsing through my veins.  She is my daughter, and I will do whatever is necessary to bring her home, even if it means humbling myself to say that we need help in raising the funds.

We started a fundraiser event on Facebook Sunday night called 150 Envelopes for Lucy, and it has been amazingly successful.  We are asking everyone to just take an envelope.  The envelopes are numbered 1-150. If you take envelope 7, then you are committing to a donation of seven dollars. We are asking that the checks be made out to our agency instead of us. Once you verbally commit to an envelope, we mail the envelope to you with a self-addressed return envelope that you put your check in and mail to us. As of my post tonight, almost half of the envelopes have been taken.  All of these amazing people are blessing us by their generosity and desire to have Lucy united with her family.  And, God is showing us one again his plan for us, which we have known since the first time we laid eyes on Lucy.

We pray for Lucy daily, and we have also begun praying for the director and the sisters who run Lucy's orphanage. These women have a huge responsibility to care for these children, and every adoptive parent who has been to Lucy's orphanage has praised them for the great love and care they show the children. We are thankful that Lucy's situation is better it seems than the one our son was placed in after he was born.

Please continue to pray for us as we still have a few mountains to climb on this journey. The one thing that our 150 Envelopes for Lucy fundraiser has taught me though is that we are not alone on this journey.  We have a whole community of friends and family walking along beside us.