To get caught up on previous posts you can read Part 8 here.
Well another three months have passed, actually four since I wrote the part 8 post, since I last measured the goatee.
For the goatee there hasn't been much additional growth this time. It still is hanging out at about 19 cm. On the adoption front things have been pretty uneventful as well. We have heard from our placement agency twice recently but more on that in a minute. The goatee continues to be fun as well. Just today I was at the pool and somebody I hadn't seen in about a year said hi. She said "I saw the goatee and said 'I know that person.'"
So Jenn's last post prompted an email from our placement agency. They reached out just to say hi. It was nice to have the contact and to know that there wasn't much to be doing. As Jenn mentioned, our dossier is just hanging out and waiting. That was contact one.
Contact two was a little more heart wrenching. You may remember that we have said previously the hardest piece of the dossier to fill out was the form about acceptable abnormalities and the child's background. This form was about four pages long. It asked questions about what was acceptable in the parents past like history of alcohol use, mental abuse, physical abuse etc. It also asked about characteristics of the children. This section was even harder. We had to make judgments about things like missing digits, minor abnormalities (not sure what that means), missing eyes, cleft palate, and many other things I had never thought of. This was hard to do as we felt very selfish about saying no to certain things.
Earlier this week we received another email from our placement agency. This one had what is called a list of waiting children. This list is usually sibling groups of greater than three and children with other special needs. It was suggested that we consider two individual children on the list. They both have some kind of special need or tough history. The entire document contained about 50 or so children or sibling groups. As I looked through the list, it is so hard. Your heart goes out to each of the children and you want to be able to say yes but at the same time need to make sure the fit is correct.
When you have a child of your own, you hope and pray that the baby is going to be healthy. In the end though, you know you are going to love that child no matter what. In the adoption process you have a little bit of choice. This is hard. It can feel selfish to say no to somebody because she is not what you were hoping for in one way or another. We will be praying about this choice and see where God leads us. Ultimately, we will love any children we are able to bring into our family.
