Our paperwork is gone, out the door. Well, the beginning of it. The paperwork that will hopefully get us registered in a certain Eastern European country next Tuesday is gone. YAY!

Everything seemed to go wrong this week. I will not be surprised if our paperwork somehow gets lost while in transport. We had everything from misunderstands, last minute changes in license numbers, missing clearances and missing notary signatures. Thank God it all came together. I kept telling Aaron that I would not be surprised if the office we needed to go to for the apostilles was on fire or was closed because of the swine flu, or some other freak occurrence. Fortunately, it was open and they were helpful.

I have gotten lots of questions about the shirts and I will have details soon!

Remember the last part? That was Monday morning.

I was upset… I think confused is probably a more appropriate word. I knew that something like this could happen. I was confused because I thought that B was meant to be our daughter, that we were on the right path. My next thought was that there must be another little girl out there for us. I imagined that there was some similarity between our daughter and B.

I started combing waiting child listings. There was one little girl, N, we had inquired about before we adopted Reed and Lena. I asked about her again.

As I scrolled through the listings, I saw Helen. At first glance, I thought it was the same little girl. They looked a bit alike and both had stories of living in the hospital. When I got down to where it said that she had Short Bowel Syndrome, not HIV, I realized it was a different girl. I was not familiar with SBS, but I asked about her anyways. The agency told me that they might have a family for her. A few others had inquired. I am not sure why, but knowing that, I still continued to research SBS. I told the agency to keep me in the loop.

We heard back from Reece’s Rainbow about N. No information on her, but they thought they could get some in a few weeks.

Then we heard back about Helen. One family had said no. The agency was asking us if we’d like to adopt her. We knew there was a third family interested and financially ready, but this family would need to get a waiver to adopt her. Helen’s region only allows the family to have 3 kids at home already and this family has 4. We had the money ready to start an adoption, but Helen’s situation requires a family to more quickly to get her. A big concern for us would be fundraising quickly, and here was another family, financially ready. We told the agency to go to the other family and see if they could get the waiver.

They could. They were all set to go, with our blessing. Because of Helen’s medical needs, I felt relieved. We could adopt a kid with easier special needs. Special needs I knew I could handle.

N was still a possibility and we were waiting for more information on her. In the meantime, I looked at more photo listings. I asked about two more kids. James was one. I was pretty sure he was unavailable, but I wanted to be certain. Yes, he is unavailable.

The other was a little girl, L, on a photo listing outside of Reece’s Rainbow. I was told to email Bethany. This girl was so cute. By this time, we were talking to other people about our plans to adopt again. I sent my mom and sister her photo. Aaron and I even talking about what we’d give her for a name. My mom and I laughed about who L, who sounded like a real girly girl, would fit in with the boy, the copy-cat tomboy and the three dogs. Bethany emailed me back a few days later and told me that she was in a very expensive region. Okay, if she is meant to be ours, we will find a way. BUT, there was a family in her home country interested in her. Ugh. I told Bethany to let me know how that panned out. That was Saturday night.

I felt crushed. I was certain that we were supposed to adopt again. Certain. Why wasn’t it working out? Okay, God, what now? Do we wait for more information on N or L? I was really just feeling pretty confused and miserable about it. Fortunately, I have a wonderful husband and a wonderful sister, who both brought me back down to earth and reminded me of the 147 million orphans in the world. There was one for us.

Sunday and Monday morning, I continued researching different country programs, emailing agencies. So, maybe our kid wasn’t on a photo listing. I also felt like we needed to be homestudy ready. Not sure why. I asked Reece’s Rainbow how hard it would be to transfer our homestudy from one country to another after it was written (N and L are in different countries). Not much of a problem. I emailed our social worker.

She emailed me back on Monday morning. She would be happy to start it immediately, but we needed to pick a country first. Ugh. We couldn’t pick one. Ukraine is in our hearts, but it has some changes going on right now and requires long travel. To chose Russia, we’d have to chose an agency, which meant narrowing down the number of regions we could look at(agencies only work in certain regions). I didn’t feel ready to do that yet. Again, I felt confused and uncomfortable about it.

One more part after this…