Our Christmas Miracle!

I stopped believing in miracles on October 30, 1999. We had gone through a pretty rough time that year, and I was in a bad place. Through the years, however, I have come to realize that miracles do still happen, usually for other people, but they are there none the less. My boys have always been my miracles. I work in a hospital and miracles happen there everyday. I have also spent countless hours reading other families adoption stories and rejoicing with them when they found their children. When we started our paperwork in April, 2006, I was excited to think that maybe, just maybe, it would soon be our turn for a miracle. I had resigned myself that it was going to take 18 months to bring our baby home and I was content with that fact (a little impatient at times), but just knowing eventually it was going to happen, gave me a sense of peace.

I never expected the miracle that happened to us on December 14, 2006. It had been a bad week at work and all I wanted to do was curl up in my chair and not move. I usually always scan the message boards just to see if anything exciting had happened during the day, so I sat down at my desk and started reading. For some reason, I went to the Children of the World website (they are our homestudy agency). I never go there. I have no idea why I went or what I was looking for. When the site came up, I saw a link for Waiting Children. Now that’s odd, I thought, because they never have waiting children. So I clicked and the first face I saw was our Lily Mei. My heart sang at the sight of her. I told Steve “I have just found our baby”. He took one look and totally agreed. We called Mrs. Pat on her cell phone and the next day she faxed her file. I emailed it to Dr. Chambers at the UAB adoption clinic and she called me Sunday night and we talked for a long time. She said she was right on target, saw no problems what-so-ever and gave us her blessing. We called Mrs. Pat on Monday and she immediately got the ball rolling.

Now, here’s the second part of our miracle. For those of you in the adoption community, you know the 171H is the “golden ticket”. We had been waiting 87 days for that piece of paper and it still had not arrived. Now, if we had it any sooner or if we hadn’t had a couple of setbacks with our homestudy, our paperwork could have already been sent to China and we would not have been allowed to change agencies. We found Lily on Thursday, received her file on Friday, and got our 171H in the mail on Saturday. What more confirmation did we need?

We are excited beyond words! So what’s next? Well, I’m not exactly sure of the details. I know we have to get approval from the CCAA and then get a consulate appointment. Mrs. Pat seems to think we might travel as soon as April! That in itself would be a miracle because some of our friends have had to wait much longer for travel approval. But, you know, I’m not ruling it out because I believe in miracles again……