Referral Day!!!

3 Years! I can barely believe that it has been three years since we got that amazing phone call that started our family! It was July 5th that our agency called to ask if we would like to consider a referral of an 11 week old girl, Jhang, Xiang Ting. We couldn't say yes fast enough and that was even before we got to see her pictures and find out that she was the most beautiful baby girl the world has ever known! I have said a million times that our entire adoption experience had an almost magical feel to it. The Lord reigned His blessings down so abundantly during those months and it began on this day. Chills cover my arms and butterflies fill my tummy as I remember it.

I am so grateful that we were chosen to parent this lovely little person. My heart bursts with the love that I have for her and the desperation that I feel to protect and provide for her. I am so glad that she is the one who made me a mommy and that she came to our family as our first child. Laney was made to be a big sister. She has an older brother and sister biologically that I hope she gets to know someday. And while I know that she would have been a blessing in their family, I am so thankful that my boys get to be loved by her and cared for so tenderly by her. Their lives are made so much richer by her sheer existence. All of our lives are. The truth is, I believe that Laney would have brought her biological family or even another adoptive family the same indescribable joy that she brings to us which leaves me staggered by the knowledge that we were chosen to get to have this precious, complicated, clever, wonderful, compassionate girl as our very own.

Laney found a empty scrapbooking book on her bookshelf a while ago. It is one of the small ones that has room for one picture per page. Recently she has been asking me to read it to her. It has blank pages, so I flip through the pages and tell her "Her Story." She watches my face now expecting me to start crying. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Tonight we looked at her referral pictures and I told her all about how I danced in the middle of the street when I heard about the little "buddha baby" that could be my daughter. She laughed. I cried.