when you were a little girl, did you imagine meeting your baby in an airport? me neither. but...in this picture, does it look i care where i am? i only see her. and she only sees me.
from this moment forward, we were family.
we were not together yet when this picture was taken. but on 7/9/05, matt and i were talking about adoption...within hours of when this picture was taken, i told matt that we needed to move fast because our baby was waiting for us. isn't god incredible?
on 7/14/05, we decided to make it happen. we had no idea how it would come together, but after years of trying to begin our family, we had done it. i instantly felt like i could not work fast enough to get our baby home. like every day that passed was wasted time. on 10/12/05, we received our referral. we laid our eyes on the first images of our sweet sophie.
over the six months from when we accepted her referral to when she came home, we received 3 updates that chronicled our baby's first year.
we could tell, even from the picture, that she was special.
she was lovely.
and tiny. when she came home, on 4/25/06, she was 13 months and she weighed only 17 pounds. (nora is 8 months and easily pulls in at 21 pounds.)
this is sophie on the infamous 'kss rug'. every baby that lives in/comes from this particular orphanage gets their update photos taken on this very rug. sophie lived at kss until she was 6 months old. she was then assigned a foster family...she lived with a lovey woman, her husband and her daughter. sophie also lived with another foster child...he came home to his family on the same flight with sophie. his name is alex and he lives in ohio. in more ways than one, sophie is a part of something so much bigger than just her. i guess we all are.
when we got these pictures, i cried. it was so real to me that she was not a little baby and that i had missed so much. i would come to learn that in reality, i had missed very little and that every milestone i got with her was what was important. sure, adoption has it's challenges, but they pale in comparison to the good in it.
sophie was walking before she was nine months old. she spent most of her time indoors. when she first got home, she hated being outside and was terrified of grass.
she was so wonderfully cared for and so beautifully loved throughout her 13 months in korea.by her birth mom. by her care-givers and nurses. by her foster family. by us. and by her heavenly father. she was never far from our minds.
we are blessed by her. and by adoption.
i think about sophie's birth mom often. sophie does too. when she asks about her, i am always honest. i tell her that she was meant for our family from the beginning of time. i explain that her birth mom loved her so much. i tell her that i couldn't grow her in my tummy, so her brith mom grew her for me and then, when it was time, she came home to us. and that we are so blessed. we talk about sophie's gotcha day in the same way that we talk about the days when ellee, casey, and nora were born. these are the days when i got to meet my babies. and sometimes these days mean different things for different people, and that's ok.
this is sophie with her foster mom. we pray for her too. she did an amazing job with our lil' lady.
she started off small, but her future was bright.
sophie was the start of all this. adoption is a gift and if you haven't thought about it for your family, you should. i'm just sayin'.
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