Our 5th child is a girl! She is waiting for us in China, somewhere on the old Silk Road. I'm not supposed to post her exact location, Chinese name, or photo until we get further along in the process. She is a very beautiful little girl, one day younger than Catherine Rose, and has some special needs. We plan to give her a saint name in addition to her Chinese name and our last name, so in posts I will call her by her future saint name, Therese. I saw a resemblance between her picture and a picture of Saint Therese, the Little Flower, and it seemed fitting because St. Therese wanted to be a missionary, and even though she lived as a cloistered Carmelite nun, she sent her prayers out to the whole world. I think that giving a little girl from China her name is somehow very special. Our little Therese is a very small girl and part of her Chinese name means orchid. She was born with spina bifida and clubbed feet. Her spina bifida was repaired as a baby but her feet have not been corrected, so she cannot walk much and is very delayed in her gross motor skills. She was on the waiting child list for over a year before I saw her picture on our agency's photolisting.
It is very hard to choose a child from the waiting child list. There are so many, and so much to think about--whether we can handle various medical needs, what age of child, etc. Most agencies choose a selection of children to feature on their own list, with pictures and a little profile of the child. There are so many darling little faces, and they all need a family! I was looking more at the boy's pictures since I have always wanted to adopt a little boy from China, but Catherine has wanted a sister so much, I decided to look at the girls on the list too. For some reason, her face looked familiar to me, and I kept going back and looking at her information. She has a cute little half smile in the corner of her mouth in the photo on the listing, and a completely shaved head. Somehow those pictured eyes went right through me, but I kept looking at other children for awhile because she was older than we were thinking of, and our homestudy agency is opposed to out of birth order adoptions. Eventually I did request her medical file and got our homestudy agency to agree, and we submitted our LOI (Letter of Intent) for her. We got our PA (pre-approval) from China very quickly. PA just means that her file is assigned to us and now we have 6 months to get all our documents in. We are waiting on our homestudy now, so we can submit our immigration paperwork. If all goes well, we will just make the deadline.
