confessions of a broken heart

mother's day this year was bittersweet. i was so thankful to spend the day as a family and dave made sure we did whatever my heart desired. last year i asked dave to help our kids make me pages in a scrapbook that i wanted to keep over the years. i had this idea from a magazine and thought it was perfect-because being me i would want to keep every card they made, plus i love scrapbooks! i actually walked in on dave helping beniah this year (i came home on my lunch break and surprised them!), but didn't take a peak because i really did want it to be special. so while dave was getting breakfast ready (strawberry crepes, yum!) beniah hands me my book and climbs into my lap. we open to the first page and i show him the page he (dave) made last year and how big his hand has grown since then! we giggled and beniah turned the page. this year's page had pictures of both beniah and hanul with "happy mother's day 2012! love, b & h". i immediately teared up. i wasn't expecting to see her in my book quite yet.

i tell everyone who asks that i have two kids. i tell them about beniah and my daughter hanul. i explain that she is not quite home yet. but i really do love her and see her as my daughter. but i realized something. i've been guarding my heart the past month or so. there are definitely days that dave just looks at me and knows that i'm thinking of her and i can't help but cry out that i miss her. i started collecting items for a care package to send her a couple months ago and still have not sent it off. bad adoptive mother..i know. i'm sorted through clothes we've received, but i keep tucking them in the back of our closet. i want her home so badly that its very hard to confront the fact that she isn't here. but i know this is not fair-for her or me. she is still my daughter and i love her no matter where she is.

i never thought we would have celebrated mother's day without her here. when we had her referral the latest we thought we would travel would be february. whenever i look at the calendar i still can't believe its may. i'm almost in denial about it. i need to recalibrate my mind. hanul's homecoming will not be when is convenient for our family or when our agency thinks it will be. it will be exactly when God has intended it to be all along.

daughter from danang

i'm on good terms with netflix again. had it not been for their suggestion i may never have seen this movie, but while folding laundry today i had to privilege of watching "daughter from danang".

its a documentary film that follows a vietnamese adoptee's return visit to vietnam to "meet" her birth mother. she was part of operation babylift at the end of the vietnam war when thousands of babies were airlifted out of vietnam and placed for adoption around the world. her mother feared her life would be in danger because of her mixed race (her father was an american solider) so she choose to place her in the care of a family abroad. watching these mothers breaking down in tears while gripping their children before letting them walk onto a plane broke my heart. and i was frustrated that they felt this was the best choice that was to be made.

while i completely believe that adoption can be the best decision for some, adoption has become a business in some countries. the film makes note that some parents were being pressured into sending their children away. my only hope was that in the moment these adoption caseworkers truly believed this was what was best for the children. there was an element of uncertainty: once the war ended some were unsure what would happen to them and believed their lives were in danger while others wondered if they could actually care for their children.

the film takes you along for the journey of heidi returning to the land that had once been home. she experiences seeing her mother for the first time in 22 years, coming back home to where she had once lived, and meeting relatives she could have never imagined. while visiting heidi experiences highs and lows as she tries to understand who she is as well as who her birth family is to her. i have mixed feelings about how it ends. adoption is complicated and can leave many mixed emotions.

you should watch it and then tell me what you think.

Isabel 2012

"If that happened one night in America, it would be on the cover of Newsweek." - Jason Russell, Invisible Children


saturday night one of my students little sisters was taken from her room, she has been missing since. naturally this is a big deal and makes me physically ill thinking about it. this is precisely the point my wife pointed out, that was made in the viral kony 2012 film, a child's life is immeasurably valuable no matter where they are born, yet in the u.s. this event gets national attention. nancy grace says that isabel's school administrators should be suspect, there's a winning opinion.

please pray for isabel and her family, lets fight tirelessly to bring her home and always remember the value of every child's life...no matter where they were born.

bumps along the road

our journey has been longer than we anticipated when we began. when we sent in our application in november the timeline from application to bringing your child home was 9-24 months. now the wait times are extended to include 6-12 months in between completed homestudy and referral and then an additional 12 months before you travel. and while i knew from the beginning that the only guarantee in adoption is that you will wait, each passing day is still hard.

today our little girl is 18 months old.

when we were matched with her back in july she was 9 months old. i had always thought she would be home by the time she was 18 months. don't ask why, just one of those silly things you think you know about your adoption (that you have no control over).

we've made progress, but received a letter requesting more information to process our i600.
just when i thought we were moving forward we hit a bump.

each day i try to rest in His promises as i gaze at her picture. soon my love, soon.

finally!

last week i received an update to our homestudy. when jojo, our manny, moved in we had to add him on our homestudy and then i got a promotion so we had to update that as well. i've been waiting for this update for quite awhile and now that i have it i can move forward with the qualification on our side (by our side, i mean the u.s. side). so the day after i got the package in the mail i was compiling documents and printing our forms to send into u.s. immigration. 

after a 20 minute freak out session where i thought i had lost our i600 approval letter (which determines us capable to provide care for an orphan, love that language) which we had recieved back in oct. i finally found it, in the bundle of documents i had prepped to send in to uscis once i got my updated homestudy. *whew* then i got together our mailings and was so excited i had to take a picture. ;)

is he as excited as i was? don't think so. he actually tried to eat the package..don't ask me why!

hopefully we'll have everything done on the u.s. side once korea is ready to move-don't want to miss our chance!

adventures in arizona: chiricahua national monument

while at ft. bowie i picked up a pamphlet for the chiricahua national monument and showed dave a picture. "i want to go here." the photo was breaktaking, as was the park itself. look at these amazing rocks!

it wasn't far from ft. bowie, but we decided to come back another day as we were all a little tired from our hike there. so a couple weeks later we returned to the region and discovered this amazing hidden valley, or "sky islands" as they were called. the visitor center was open and humming with tourists and guides. the guides were very friendly and helpful in deciding where we should go. they choose echo canyon for us as it would have good views, but was family friendly.

the visitor center also had a short video about the chiricahuas. it provided a little of the backstory of ft. bowie and how the chiricuhuas were a home to the apache indians. i ended up walking out with beniah because he wasn't that interested in the documentary, but i would have loved to finish it. ;)

we headed up the seven mile road to our trailhead. the drive out there we kept looking for these amazing rocks and couldn't find them. they are hidden within the valley of this mountain range so its not until you drive into the state park that you begin to see everything. i would have taken a TON more pictures..but my battery was near dead (silly me) so we only have a few.

at the trailhead of echo canyon.

the view NEVER got old!

unfortunately this photo does not do this area justice..at all. this is echo canyon grotte. there were huge rocks that were suspended above you balancing on rocks on the sides. so that rock in the top right corner of the photo looks as if it could just fall in at any moment.

here you can kind of see how the rocks are hanging between other rocks. the rock directly behind the boys was just hanging out.

while i was setting B up for a photo, dave climbed behind the rocks and surprised him

it was so beautiful and serene-i couldn't help myself!

i'm still trying to convince dave to do a camping trip. he is not very interested. at the start of this hike he thought out loud, "maybe we could come back and camp out here." i gleefully reminded him on the way back to the car and he decided he had changed his mind. he claims he is not a camper. :( i will keep trying! :)

movement

last week was a much anticipated week in the world of korean adoption. after much delay and confusion, ep's have finally started to be submitted. looking around at blogs of other adoptive families my heart smiles as they share their family's news of taking the next step in the process. so exciting.

i also spotted a customer in line this morning holding parenting your internationally adopted child. as i made his white mocha i blurted out, "micheal, i have to ask, are you adopting?" his face spread into a smile as he told me they were leaving this afternoon to travel to ethiopia. we chatted a little about how long the wait has been and about his little girl. he showed me beautiful pictures. and i was just overwhelmed with joy for him and his wife who have been waiting three whole years.

the past couple months have been somewhat crushing because as people would ask me, "when is she coming home?" i had no answer to give them. i just had to explain that i really had no idea and that we were just waiting.

a month ago beniah was talking about sharing his bathroom with joey and i mentioned to him that he would also be sharing it with hanul when he came home. he responded, "she won't come home for a long, long time. she is far away." hearing those words out of his mouth was heartbreaking. he used to tell me she was coming home soon, sometimes it was even tomorrow. and while i obviously knew that wasn't true hearing the hope in his answers was light. this response was like darkness. but now there is a  light at the end of the tunnel.

the uncertainty of adoption causes you to constantly hold fast to the promises of the lord. and i will continue to wait-i know we have some time. we have been waiting (since referral) for six months and families who were submitted first have been waiting upwards of a year. just knowing there is movement is good enough for my heart for the time being. and my delight comes from seeing others welcoming home their sweet gifts from the lord.