It has now been more than a year since we first learned who our baby girl would be, saw her sweet, scared face and knew her name. It’s been two years since we filled out our application and handed over our first big check to start this long process.
Next week is Mother’s Day, of course, which is so hard for some of my friends in the process who have been waiting forever to bring their first children home from Haiti. It’s less hard for me because I already have two amazing kids at home, but it’s bittersweet.
The really tough part though, is missing Rosenaicha’s birthday next week. My sweet little lady turns two on the fourteenth. I’m mailing a package of things for Rose to another mother who is traveling to the orphanage next week to pick up her son and bring him home. Shoes, a dress, some photos and stickers. In every new photo I see, she is wearing the shoes I brought for her. She loves shoes.
We got an update on Rose today! Size-wise, she’s still so small, off the bottom of both the height and weight growth charts. In group photos it looks to me like all the other toddlers are growing taller than Rose. I can share this description:
Rosenaicha, is a pleasure for the nannies and is a very cooperative and good natured little girl. She is constantly laughing and playing with her friends in the toddler room. She has a very active imagination and a lot of times you’ll see her playing with some dolls or building something with Legos. Rosenaicha is also very sweet and caring – the other day one of the toddlers fell over and Rosenaicha stopped what she was doing and helped her up. When you walk in to the toddler room she is one of the first ones to hug your legs. Rosenaicha is eating by herself, but is a very messy eater. Sometimes she will get a spoon full of food, and pretend to offer it to you, but instead shoves it into her mouth with a BIG grin. She has a cute sense of humor and loves playing tricks like that on people.
She did this food teasing with me when I was there. In fact it’s possible I encouraged it 🙂
One slight disappointment is learning that her file is still being reviewed by the Ministry of the Interior. I was hoping that would be done last week and she could get her passport, but not quite yet. After her passport the file moves to the Embassy where USCIS does a full investigation, searching for any possible adoption fraud before granting her permission to get a US visa. That can take a month or two. So I’m guessing now it’ll be July till we can get her. Praying for sooner, of course.
In the meantime we are not just sitting on our hands waiting anymore. We filed an addendum to our homestudy because of Mike’s job change, and a couple of things were not written correctly in the addendum, which resulted in USCIS sending us a Request for Evidence. That totally stinks. This prompted our social worker to decide that we had to do an entire homestudy update because ours was expired, despite the fact that USCIS did not require a whole new update. So now we are jumping through hoops again, filling out forms, getting new physicals and dog vaccinations, etc. Of course it means more money too. But we’ll get it done and hope it does not delay the USCIS investigation any longer than necessary.
We press on, knowing that God’s timing is perfect and all the waiting means he is doing a work in us, growing us to depend on Him more fully.
