It's A Boy!

We are very excited to report that we have been officially matched with a little boy! He is 15 months old with cleft lip and palate and we are just waiting for paperwork and official approval before we can go get him!

This was much sooner than expected. We were thinking that we might get a match by next spring or summer. In fact, it was one week ago today that I was reading an article from our agency about how slow everything was going and how wait times were getting longer every day. It was about 30 minutes after that when the call came in.

My kids were supposed to be resting in their rooms, but there was a little too much rowdy laughter coming from the hallway to support that theory. I decided to ignore them as I peeled apples for a pie. It had been an exhausting and emotionally draining couple of days for other reasons and I was determined to have a few minutes to myself before "naptime" was over.

The phone rings and I think it is my sister, but I answer to find that it was our agency calling to let me know that they had a little boy for us. Just like that. Life has a strange way of changing really fast sometimes.

I was told that he had one of the most severe forms of cleft lip and cleft palate and that he had actually just returned from surgery to repair his lip. I hung up the phone, but I was afraid to check email for a few minutes. I don't really know why. I was thinking about this little boy recovering from surgery, not knowing that on the other side of the world some emotionally-overwrought woman was about to look at his picture and decide if she wanted to be his mommy or not. It was too much.

Eventually, I did open the email and found a picture of a sweet, chubby-cheeked 9-month-old. His life synopsis was strikingly short: "found on the side of the road in such and such a province." I'm told that cleft palate babies are abandoned because the majority of Chinese families would not have the means to provide the surgeries and therapies that are needed, and it would be extremely difficult to make it in a culture with tonal language.

I wondered how Phil would respond when he saw the picture. When he came home from work, he took one look at him and pronounced him to be adorable. On second glance he said, "I think he kind of looks like me."