My Daughter

A year and one month ago today I saw the picture of my daughter for the first time..........Just pausing to reflect...... I will be honest, I was scared when I first saw her face. Part of the problem is the report I got about her seem so empty of information. I found out months later that the report was missing several pages. If we had received these pages we may have not been as concerned. But the paper work did not tell why they had labeled her with the special need that they did(Even the completed report didn't tell me this). We questioned if there was more going on than the paperwork said. We analyzed the picture to death. I hate to say that. She looked so confused. She just didn't seem quite right. Was she sick or had she just been woken up? Her eyes were red and puffy. What was wrong? Because of that we started questioning if there were more development issues than China said. Let's face it. When you adopt, especially since it was the special needs program, there are going to be unknowns and we knew that when we started down this road. When it finally came down to it there was nothing in the paper work that could make us say no. It was the unknowns that scared us and we couldn't control this. So we sent our LOI and celebrated our daughter by eating at a Chinese resturant.

Days later we got new pictures and answers to some of our questions and our fears melted away. There were still questons, but we knew we could deal with them and were ready to face whatever challenges that we would face. I look at the picture now and see the eyes of my daughter, but she looks nothing like this picture now. When I was in the middle of all the steps to get to our daughter, I got alittle crazy about the dates. I looked at the calendar and started counting weeks and months and trying to figure out how long it would take to hold her in our arms. I am so glad that I didn't know that it would be 7 months until we would land on US soil with our precious daughter(we have been home 6 months today). I would have colapsed in a mess of tears, but now, it doesn't matter. After a failed adoption you start to wonder if you will ever get to your child. Honestly I couldn't even hardly allow myself to think about her being in my arms. I was so afraid that circumstances that we could not control would happen in our lives and make it so that we couldn't adopt her. Now she is here and it does not matter. The timing was perfect. Here are some new pictures taken a month ago. It is so amazing to call her my daughter. Our family is so blessed. She is truly amazing!