I am going to write this in 3 parts, posted over a few days. I want to share all of the details, but I also think it is pretty long to post all at once. Here we go…

The first time we adopted I felt like it was a choice. We wanted to adopt and we said “yes, we will bring these two kids home.” We chose adoption and Reed and Lena. This time, it honestly feels divine.

I said we weren’t going to adopt again, and I meant it. Well, maybe I really meant we would adopt again in several years, after Reed and Lena were older. Maybe we’d have bio kids. I didn’t think I wanted to adopt internationally again, especially from a country with such long travel.

I still looked at the children on Reece’s Rainbow from time to time, but it felt safe. I felt detached from them. There were no longer children from Reed and Lena’s orphanage listed (all adopted or unavailable now). One day I saw a cute baby girl, Helen, who was HIV+. She was just over a year old and had a unique story about living in the hospital for her whole life. I told Aaron it was good I didn’t want to adopt again, or we would be bringing her home. She quickly had a family commit to her.

Around the same time, I read of another little girl, B, who needed a family. B was also HIV+, really cute and spunky. A blog friend/fellow adoptive mom had met this sweet girl during her visits with her daughter and wrote a wonderful description of her. She sounded really sweet and really caught my attention, but we were not adopting again. Another family stepped up to adopt her, and we were excited for them.

Flash forward a few months. That family was unable to adopt B. Very sad for her, very sad for this family. But, we weren’t adopting again. I could not get that girl off of my mind. I fought it, thinking about why I didn’t want another kid right now. Especially one her age. She was smack-dab in the middle of Reed and Lena, so they’d each be 6 months apart. It didn’t sound too fun to me, yet I felt like she was meant to be our daughter. Have I mentioned I was feeling all this and I hadn’t communicated it to my husband yet?

I’d just ask Aaron and it would be over. Too much money, another kid the same age, traveling again, too soon. Lots of reasons for him to say no. Instead, he said “tell me more about her.” My husband has such a compassionate heart.

I began to gather information from people who had met B or keep track of information on waiting children. Accounts of her, photos. I got one particular long, wonderful description of her, pleading for her family and I was ready to say “yes!” I showed it to Aaron. But, we had a busy day with company over, so we didn’t get a chance to talk about it right then. A couple of hours later, the same person emailed me back saying that B had a family. “Are you her family?” Nope.

To be continued…