As so many
of you know, we began our adoption journey this past June. We celebrated my
(Erin) 25th birthday in July, rejoicing with our family and close
friends in the news that we had been accepted into Bethany Christian Service’s
International Adoption Program in Ethiopia. That acceptance was only the
beginning (duh!) of a very crazy, timely, costly, and exciting journey to our little
boy.
That’s
right. I said it.
Little boy.
Our little boy.
Our little
boy who lives in South Africa.
Now I know
what some of you are thinking – or, if you’re like me and occasionally need a
world map to help locate specific countries – South Africa is NOT Ethiopia.
South Africa isn’t even close to Ethiopia on the beautiful continent of Africa.
In fact, it is approximately 3,495 miles from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Johannesburg,
South Africa. That’s a long way. It’s especially “far” in Africa, with the lack
of quality, efficient, and safe routes to travel by.
My point
being this – we are currently in the process of a “concurrent adoption.” Now I’ve
tried my best to define this in the simplest of terms and the lovely world wide
web hasn’t given me much help. But I will do my best to explain what it is and
how we have arrived to where we are.
A concurrent
adoption(s) is when a family is en route to adopting children from two separate
countries. In our case, we are currently on the wait list for a child(or 2)
from Ethiopia, and are proceeding in an adoption of a little boy from South
Africa. Most families (who are few and far between) arrive at a concurrent
adoption in their personal journey because the wait in one country is projected
to be very long. We did not proceed with our adoptions because of the wait in
Ethiopia. We chose to concurrently adopt because of one reason…
Him. Our
little boy.
The journey
that brought us to him is what many people would call crazy. I call it love… we
could probably call it crazy love. Because that’s what it is. That is how we
feel. We have fallen crazy in love with this little boy. And at some point, we
just knew. That’s him! He is ours!
Our journey
to him has been an interesting one. And I am prepared to tell you… because I
think it’s pretty cool. And crazy.
A few months
ago, I noticed an absolutely adorable little boy on Bethany’s Waiting Child
list (a list of kids who haven’t been matched with a forever family – usually because
of physical and developmental disabilities or because they are an older child).
I mean seriously, he was (and is) so stinkin’ cute! At the time, December-ish,
I told Craig, “If that little bugger is still on there in 2 years, we are
bringing him home!” Craig agreed that if he was still on the waiting list after
we brought our child(ren) home from Ethiopia, we would definitely bring him
into our growing little family.
Fast forward
four months to March. We’ve finished all of our paperwork for Ethiopia and are
officially on the waiting list for a referral. We still regularly check the
waiting child list, but for some reason in the beginning of March, I could not
get over the fact that he was still on this list! How could someone not go crazy
over this little schmunchkin! I started to lovingly joke around with Craig and
tell him that this boy was ours and we were going to get him first somehow. He
would be our “first-born” or “first-home” child. I wasn’t really joking. And
Craig was taking me pretty seriously. We began to pray about it and
discuss it – this tiny tot encompassed most of, if not all of, my spare
thought.
One day, I
just knew. I was absolutely convinced. God made it so very clear to me. Even
more so the weekend of our adoption party that our best friends threw for us to
celebrate how far we had come in our journey. A very good friend of ours gave
us a LeapPad as a gift… this is what it looks like:
Sunday
morning, the day after our party, our pastor at HVC preached from the book of
Matthew, and Craig watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_Lax4zFFoA
Craig told
me he had never been so sure of something in his life. That we were going to
adopt that little cute, funny, adorable boy who we saw on the waiting list so
many months ago. That he no longer had any fears about his future long-term
care and no worries about how our other future children would love him.
A few days
later, a good friend from work told me that she remembered a mistake in our
home study way back in October:
That picture
of the LeapPad, that sermon, that video, and that ‘mistake’ all point to him
(and Him).
You see, our
son’s name on the waiting list was Matthew**. And Matthew has Down Syndrome.
**Matthew is
his ‘pseudo-name’ for protection, the name we knew him by, but not his actual
name**
We are
currently working on completing our paperwork for South Africa – the faster we
finish, the faster we can bring him home to us. And bring us to him.
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