A beautiful day

The day is finally here... the day to introduce our daughter, Lorelei Anxiang. It will be several months before we are with her in China, but her presence in our family is already very much felt. She is amazing.... brave... kind... creative... all of this we know from the people who have met her. We are incredibly blessed to be her family.

(In case you haven't noticed, this is my first blog post and it's harder than I thought it would be to put all of this into words!)

Those of you who have walked with us on our adoption journey for the past five years know about the child we thought we were waiting for. A daughter, "as young as possible," no significant special needs. But there are some big truths to be found in the waiting process... we learned that there are more "waiting children" (older or with special needs) in orphanages there now. We learned that our idea of who our daughter is much more open than we originally thought. We learned that God definitely has a plan for how this story would unfold.

Last fall we let our adoption agency know that we wanted to be considered for a child with special needs, and then we started looking at children's profiles. Those of you who have been through this know that it is a roller-coaster emotional experience. We asked about a few children, but each time they had already been chosen by another family. Chris said it was a little bit of heartbreak each time... letting our hearts open to the possibility of finding HER (all the while having to say "no" to children whose needs were too great for our family).

A few weeks after Christmas, I found her picture on the blog of an organization--Love Without Boundaries--which supports orphan care and medical treatments in China. There was just something about her that touched my heart. When Chris saw her picture, he immediately said we needed to find out more about her. I think he knew right then that she was our daughter.

Since that day, there have been moments of joy... questions... concerns... excitement... uncertainty... and finally, the very certain knowledge that we are her family. We enter into this new part of our journey knowing that there will be both incredible mountaintops and challenging valleys ahead, but we can't wait to see what amazing things HE has in store for all of us.

Now for the details.... She is 10 years old and in Guangdong province in southern China, not far from Hong Kong. We are currently waiting for our immigration paperwork (here in the US) to be completed, which hopefully will be done by April. Then China will give us TA (travel approval) to come there and our adoption agency will plan the trip, which should take 10-14 days. We hope to travel by early summer.

I will update here as we hear more news! Thank you for your friendship, love, support, and prayers as we continue on this journey.