7 months "pregnant"

Adoption is often called a "paper pregnancy."  There are some similarities between a pregnancy and a paper pregnancy like having to wait, getting your child's room ready, buying clothes and other things that your child will need.  But there are, obviously, more differences than similarities.  Recently, when talking about the difficulty of not knowing when we will get to go to China and get our daughter, someone told me, "Well, at least you'll get to bring her home sooner than 9 months" referring to how long pregnancy takes.  Well, I beg to differ because today marks 7 months to the day of our "conception."  We applied to Holt on October 1st.  We will not be bringing Liana home in two months.  There's zero chance of that happening.  We are more likely to bring her home around 12 months after we began this process.  I know what you're thinking, but that's so quick for adoption!  True, it is quick, in theory.  But, when you know that your daughter is half a world away, being raised in an orphanage and growing older every day, it's not so quick, is it?  See, I've been there with having a child through pregnancy.  Pregnancy was tough on me.  I had morning sickness over half of my pregnancy, I had contractions starting the first trimester, which was so scary, and I had big babies.  Ethan was 10lbs 2oz. and, while my labor wasn't really bad at all, my pregnancy was tough.  Carrying around a 10lb baby in your tummy is nothing to laugh at.  So, I'm not saying that pregnancy is easy.  But, no matter how late your baby comes, your day 1 with your new child is their day 1 as well.  Our day 1 with Liana will start with her year 2.  Every day that we don't have her home is another day that she's growing up without us.  We don't know what her life is like in the orphanage but we do know that it's nothing like growing up in a home with a family.  This breaks my heart.  Every day, I think of our daughter and what time it is for her in China and I pray that she's sleeping well/being loved/getting a good meal/having fun...whatever.  She's not growing inside of my tummy just developing until she's ready to join the world.  She's in the world and she's more than ready to join our family.  And we are so ready for her. 

I know we're early in our waiting and I know that we've only had a picture of our daughter for a month and 11 days but we've been working towards bringing her home for 7 months.  This has not been an easy 7 months.  It's been stressful and busy and so much of it has been completely out of our control.  The only thing that I can do is remind myself that God's in control and has taken care of it this far.  And look how far we've come!  I never imagined we would have our referral in March.  We've been truly blessed with our adoption and some things have gone much faster than we, or even our agency, expected.  We know why.  God was hurrying us up to catch us up to Liana.  If we had been one day later, we would have missed out on her.  There are so many things that could have gone faster where I dropped the ball, or someone else did.  But God, in His amazing wisdom, just hurried us up in other areas so that we were ready, exactly on time. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. I think about this every day and I just can't praise Him enough.  So, as this paper pregnancy continues, we will continue to prepare ourselves and pray for our little girl, just like we did with Ethan and Ella.  And if you're the praying type too, please pray for a quick LOA for us because that's the biggest hold up to getting our girl!

Day 40, waiting for our LOA....