Recap-

I posted this on my adoption yahoo group.


Hi. I think I only posted once before, sometime last year. We adopted 2 year old
twins. It has been quite the journey, in many ways not like I expected. Adjusting has been difficult to say the least. Please know if you actually finish reading this post, it is not meant to be negative. On the contrary I hope to encourage. We went through so much before we finally found our twins. One referral died of malaria, one taken back to their village and one here in our own state pulled two weeks before placement. All of them I loved. Our referral of the twins was nothing less than God's plan. Our paperwork arrived the same time the twins were taken to the orphanage. When I first saw their pic I was filled with fear. Fear of another loss. Much to our surprise the process with our new agency went lightning fast. I was set to travel 3 months past the date of first hearing of them. Then a week before I was to leave I got a call. They were sick, but would be okay. Not wanting to take any chances, I left the next day without my husband. Not what I planned, but obviously what God planned. I will never ever forget what I saw when I walked into the orphanage. Two kids looking the shell of my first photo of them. At 22 months they weighed a mere 10 pounds. They looked like the kids from the late night infomercials. The ones whose faces haunt you. They had the skeletal frames, sunken eyes, and dead expressions, but they weren't the kids on the aids fliers and infomercials, they were my babies. It suddenly felt less like a gotcha day and more like a rescue mission. Every day I was there was so painful. The fear was intense. Are they going to live? If they do what are the life long effects going to be. My heart screamed for them, for our kids at home. Our first attempt through immigration, and we were denied the ability to bring them home. Our agency messed up. Again tears. By that time my husband was in Ethiopia. Praise God he was there to fight that battle. I was so overwhelmed with the twins state. Our little girl cried all the time and our little boy was so sick. In the midst of all of this God still had bigger plans. We met an amazing couple while we were there. God spoke, "Help them." She was pregnant with their second child, the first one died months before in utero at 8 1/2 months. They were terrified of losing this one. With help from another amazing family that was with us to pick up their own daughter, they covered her plane ticket to the states and we agreed to care for her. Our flight home was painfully long. The twins cried most of the way and the pregnant woman that was with us was sick. When we got home the twins were hospitalized. We didn't know if our son was even gonna make it. We were told over and over again that they were knocking on deaths door. In the meantime we have four other kids at home that haven't seen me in weeks and now I'm in a hospital room with their new brother and sister. I didn't want to leave them and yet I knew my other kids needed me to. As each day went by, I felt my own strength leave. The twins doctors would comment on how bad I looked. Only now do I realize the full extent of God's hand in my life during that period. I ended up having Typhoid fever, Hep A, Giardia, and tissue parasites. The twins were released a few weeks later. I continued to be sick for three months. Needless to say the last five months have been challenging. I still feel robbed in a weird way of how I thought our adoption experience was to go. I now have six kids at home that are still trying to figure out how to be a family and a pregnant Ethiopian woman that is now my best friend and is due in a month. So in a few short months we have gone from a family of six to a soon to be family of ten. NOTHING went as I planned, but EVERYTHING went as God planned.