How Do You Know?

One of the questions that I have gotten in the past few days is "how do you know?" meaning how did we know that the little boy that I found on a waiting child list was the one that we were supposed to move forward with. That is a great question and I wish I had an answer.

For months, I have checked waiting children lists. On one of the yahoo groups, I ran across a link to Bringing Hope to Children and decided to check them out. So, for a couple of weeks, I checked their list fairly regularly. I even went so far as to request the files on a couple of little boys that were precious. There were some factors that we already knew. We knew that we were going to adopt a little boy this time, we knew we were going special needs, we knew for the most part what SN we were open to. A short list which included cleft lip/cleft palate and heart defects. While the boys files that I had requested were precious, there wasn't a "tug" of my heart.

On November 19, I ran across a boy on their list that had May 25, 2008 listed after his name. That caught my eye as May 25 is my birthday. I read the information about the little boy and requested his file. When I received the information on YHH, I opened the pdf and just sort of sat there. That familiar ache of my heart was there. Not sure what it meant yet, but it was there. I forwarded the information to Pat at the church and simply said "look at this little boy" in the subject line of the email. We continued over the next 2 weeks to go back and look at the pictures. I printed the file out and took it to our Dr. to look over, something that I don't normally do but felt like I needed to. I corresponded back and forth with BHTC with some general questions, all the while, feeling that longing in my heart when I looked at his pictures. I felt as though I had a pretty clear understanding of how quickly we could move through this process and what we needed to begin.

After much prayer, we did something that I knew in my heart all along that we would do. On Saturday, December 5, I emailed Bringing Hope and let them know that we were ready to move forward with the adoption of YHH if he was still available. This was on a Saturday. We heard back from them on Sunday evening and he was in fact still available and they would contact me on Monday about getting the pre-approval process started.

So, I tell you all of that to answer your question this way. I don't have an answer to "how do you know" but somehow, you just know. There was that familiar longing that I felt deep in my heart for this child. The kind that you feel when a part of you is missing. Can't explain it, but it's there. We think he is just beautiful and is just perfect. We can't wait until we can post pictures of his beautiful face.

Thank you for sharing in our joy. You will never know how much we appreciate it.