Thank you everyone for your kind words last week about Esther. If you missed last Friday’s Family Friday where I shared about our little girl that we matched with for adoption you may want to go check it out and then come back and read this post.

Last week I gave you a quick and very loose rundown of how the actual matching process happens with adoption from Hong Kong. Today, I thought it would be fun to share the timeline of events that happened over the past couple of weeks. Experiencing it was a total whirlwind of craziness but now it’s fun to look back and see God’s steady hand at work throughout the whole process.

I really thought I would be able to share this story in one post but y’all it got long. I mean really long. Over a thousand words long and all I have is one picture to keep your attention. So it looks like this will be a two part post of…

The Days Before Esther…

Week of June 24 – This whole week I had felt a deep burden to pray for the little girl we would be adopting. I didn’t know who she was or even if she had been born yet but I knew I needed to pray for her. So, off and on throughout the week I found myself in prayer for the little girl that would be ours some day. The little girl that God already knew and loved and had waiting just for us.

Friday, June 28 – I missed a call from Angie, our social worker at Lifeline Children’s Services. She left a voicemail letting me know that a little girl had just become available for adoption. Mother’s Choice the orphanage that Lifeline partners with had sent the file that morning and specifically mentioned us as a potential family for her. Eeek! I was ecstatic after hearing this voicemail and immediately tried to get back in touch with Angie.

After a few missed calls back and forth we finally got in touch and I received the first few bits of information about this little girl. I was a little hesitant when I learned she was older than Noah but a still quiet voice inside me reminded me that I had been praying for our little girl all week and this might be her. Angie forwarded me the medical reports and information that was available and let me know that if we were interested in this little girl it would be best to let her know by Sunday afternoon so that an e-mail with our request to match would be waiting in Mother’s Choice’s inbox first thing Monday morning. (They are twelve hours ahead of us.)

So, I called and texted Michael Luke and let him know that we had information on a child that we needed to look at pronto! Hearing news out of the blue like this was quite a work distraction but somehow he managed to make it until his lunch break before getting a chance to review the files and the first pictures. I think Esther had Michael Luke’s heart from there!

Somehow we managed to make it to the end of the day, the end of keeping a friend’s kiddos, and the end of a dinner party with friends before really getting a chance to talk.

We talked… late into the night. We knew this was really a serious and life changing decision we would be making. Was this the little girl God had for us? The night ended with prayer. Prayer for this little girl and prayer for the wisdom to make the right choice.

Saturday, June 29 – We e-mailed some friends and asked them to pray for us as we made an urgent and serious decision regarding our adoption. Saturday for the most part was normal.. chores, errands, eating but we made time to talk about life would look like if this little girl was to become part of our lives.

One of our biggest concerns was that there was an eight month age difference between Noah and her. With Noah being the youngest. From the beginning we had always hoped to keep the birth order but knew there was a possibility that we might end up adopting a few months older. So it’s not that we were completely opposed to it but we wanted to make sure this was the right thing for our family. How would this affect Noah?

Thankfully, our social worker is also a mom of adopted children so I called her and asked for advice. She put everything in great perspective for me. Noah currently is both the youngest and oldest child. So if we adopted older she would still get to keep her youngest child status so to say. She is also still very young and doesn’t really understand the whole big sis, little sis thing. This really helped me and us as we realized that we couldn’t let something as trivial as age stop us from requesting to match with this little girl.

Saturday night we e-mailed Angie to let her know we wanted to formally request to match with this child! It was an awesome and exhilarating feeling and incredibly hard not to tell everyone I talked to but she wasn’t ours yet.

Wednesday, July 3 – Monday and Tuesday came and went without any word from Mother’s Choice. We were a little surprised because we knew they were normally pretty quick with replies. Michael Luke turned to Google and discovered Hong Kong had just finished celebrating a holiday similar to independence day and like us usually had taken a four day weekend. Wednesday morning we finally heard from them. They had received our request to match and would in turn let all the other agencies know and open it up for a seven day waiting period for any other families to come forward to request to match with her also. At the end of seven days the family that would be the best fit for the child would be chosen. Seven days! Seven days! Do you know how long that is when you are waiting to find out if a child will become yours or not and you have already fallen in love with her? Let me just tell you it is a long time!

That night we called our families to let them in on the series of event that had been happening and that they might have a potential granddaughter in seven days. In order to protect their hearts and her privacy we chose not to reveal any pictures of her unless we officially matched with her. It was hard enough with us already falling for her. We shared with them the good news that whether we were chosen are not in a weeks time this little girl would be on the road (figuratively speaking) to her forever family and that our prayer was that God’s will be done and the best family for her be chosen. So from their we waited… and waited. We knew that this was just the beginning of a long series of events before finding out if she would become ours… to be continued.

Come back next week to find out how the rest of the story goes and what this pic has to do with our adoption.

Note: I refer to Esther in this post as “little girl” because Esther isn’t her current name but the name we will be giving her once we adopt her. We are choosing not to share her Chinese or English name at this time.

P.S. If this is your first time visiting or you have missed any of the other Hong Kong adoption posts check out the Hong Kong Adoption tab at the top of the page for links to all our posts.

For more Color Transformed Family follow me on:

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Hometalk,
or RSS.

Enter your email address below to receive new posts via e-mail.:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.