Today is the second biggest announcement this blog will have: (the first being the introduction of our children as ours officially), the second is the day we accepted our referral!!
See the photos for a hint about our referral....or just read on. :)
That's right, we accepted the referral of TWIN TODDLER BOYS!
Are we crazy? Absolutely. I am envisioning our future as a sandwich of Fun-Chaos-Fun.
Here's our crazy referral story:
Let me begin by saying for the last few months I had been seeing twins in our future. Twin toddlers. It got to the point where I started praying (and asked others to pray) that God would either give us twins, or he would take away these visions. I was getting to the point where I knew I would be disappointed if I did not get twins, because that was all I saw, which scared me. I kept praying for the vision to be taken away, and it wasn't. Continue story.
In June, we sent an e-mail to our agency, saying we had received our 17h form from USCIS (finally!). The 17h was the last document needed before our entire dossier could be sent to DRC. As of Monday, we were still hoping to use an orphanage out of Lubumbashi to locate our child(ren). The pre-application process was quite intense, and we had been waiting two weeks to hear if we were qualified to receive their application to the orphanage. (We never heard back from them.)
When I e-mailed the agency, I got an almost immediate answer. She was happy for us and asked to be reminded of our age range, to which I replied 0-4. The assumption was that one would be an older sibling, because we were planning on a baby.
Then I received a phone call from our agency, who wanted to "touch base" with us, which I found suspicious since she had just asked for our age range. I checked with Daniel to confirm that we were going to wait on the orphanage in Lubumbashi. It was then I told Daniel that I would need to seriously think about using the agency if they mentioned twins ( thinking that was VERY unlikely).
So I called her on my break, and this is the first thing she said, "I know you were hoping to use your pastor for your referral, but since he is so busy, maybe you would like to consider some of our waiting children on our private facebook page. We have a set of twin boys..." at this point she started listing off several other children needing homes, but I couldn't focus. She had mentioned twins, the one thing I would consider using the agency for. I told her we would look at the page and contact her in the morning.
6 long hours later, Daniel finally got home and we could look over the pictures of the waiting children. When we saw the twin boys, there was no epiphany moment other parents talk about. They weren't smiling, and they were old. By old, I mean 2 and a half. I was expecting a baby. My visions of the future clearly were of once they had grown up after we'd had them as babies, not that we'd get them at toddlers. But I kept coming back to those tiny faces.
After lots of discussion and prayer from our close friends, we decided they were still young, and there was no reason to not move forward, but we didn't know anything about them. I sent an e-mail asking for more information.
When I called her the next morning to get more information, I had to ask her the irrelevant question, "How often do you get twins?". To be honest, I was challenging God. In my mind, He still wanted me to have a baby, and if twins happened all the time, clearly it was a coincidence that she said twins that day. "We don't get them very often. Maybe one in every 30 families receive a twin." To which she added "I was honestly wondering why no one had asked about these twins sooner. They have been available for about a month, and I haven't had any real interest in them, when normally twins get snatched up pretty fast." Okay, God, these are our boys. We found a little more information about them. We knew they were two and a half-ish, they were taken from a horrible orphanage, and they cleared for HIV. No idea how long they were at the orphanage or why. And that was all the information we could get for awhile.
So that night, Daniel and I decided to move forward to adopting the twins, our sons. We called the agency the next morning to tell her the exciting news.
On the phone she also informed us that she would be traveling to DRC just a few days from then and could take a care package to them. Also, if we had our dossier ready she could take that with her. And most importantly, she would meet our boys!! What a great opportunity!
Two days later, we began sharing with our immediate family and shopping for the care package (hence the above pictures.) We had to choose their names and their birth date. That Friday was a crazy evening of visiting the lovely Marie at Mail &Misc, where she spent over an hour with just us, notarizing 10 papers and helping us overnight a package to Kentucky. Because she is wonderful, she helped us realize that FedEx is actually crazy expensive compared to USPS when it comes to overnighting something, so we dropped the package off the next morning at the post office to be overnighted to Kentucky so our agency worker could take it with her to DRC.
Then we waited to hear from our agency for more details on our boys. Which brings us today! A few days ago we received updated photos (which I cannot share on social media sites, but if you catch me in person, I'd be happy to share!), and they are absolutely adorable, with perfect smiles! We also received confirmation that the agency has agreed to move forward with our adoption, and now we are awaiting a court date!!
We are so excited about these boys, and are already envisioning how our future will be with two small boys everywhere we go. What a wonderful/crazy/chaotic addition to our life!
Read more at http://weleftourheartsindrc.blogspot.com/
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