wildfires

One of the things I'll miss most when we leave California is the drastic temperature drop at night. Even when the temperature hits a hundred degrees during the day, mother nature gives us a gracious break with lows in the high fifties. This extreme daily deviation in temperature makes summer a bit more manageable, and most importantly, yields a delicious grape and a fine wine!  

Further, one of my favorite times of day during the summer is when the sun finally sets behind the western hills. We can pull up the shades and open the windows, let some of the evening breeze in to dissipate the lingering afternoon heat. There are still remnants of light in the sky, which contrast against the silhouette of the hills outside our kitchen window.

The days are getting shorter now. We are able to lift the blinds earlier and earlier. Summer is winding down, it has stayed its welcome, but quite frankly, I think it's time for it to go.

There were two wildfires that broke out in the hills by our home last week, both of them less than a couple miles away. We could see the angry flames, the black smoke lifting up from the dry grass, which is like kindling at this time of year. It hasn't rained in almost three months...not a even a cloud in the sky. The blonde slopes are charcoal black now. Summer, it seems, is not going to fade away quietly this year.

(photo credit: my friend, Emily, who lives a mile from where the fires burned, took these last two photos)

As I look at our schedule for the autumn, I'm excited for cooler temps and overcast skies, and yet I'm mindful of the insanity that awaits us. In attempts to make the most of our last year on the west coast, we have planned some fun adventures over the course of the next months--Vegas, Disneyland, Monterrey. By mid November, however, we are placing ourselves on "lock down," as we anticipate that we'll be gearing up for our big trip to China at some point this winter.  

So, despite my readiness for summer to disappear, I'm aware that our family is currently experiencing the calm before the storm. I'm relishing the simplicity of our days right now, even if the landscape is going up in smoke.  

These days are numbered and we will never get them back. This is true all of the time and for every person, but right now, I suppose I'm more in touch with the reality of it. 

Whenever a big change is on the horizon, I tend to walk around with a lucid awareness of the fragility of life. I can feel the minutes slipping through my fingertips. Just like the summer landscape, our family's sense of "normal" will go up in flames over the course of the next several months. I already feel the shifts taking place. I'm aware that Lucy will not be my baby for much longer, and as excited and thrilled as I am about the changes coming upon us, there is a part of me that's starting to grieve the slow disintegration of life as we now know it.

Literary Lucy

One of my favorite things about my littlest girl, Lu, is that she loves to read,

just like me,

and one of my favorite parts of the day is to read to her and her big sis.

Lu is not afraid to make her requests known. She crawls right on top of me, plants her diapered bum on my belly or my chest, whichever anatomical landscape offers the best view,

and starts to grunt, whine, scream, or repeat "boo" (aka book) until I succumb to her demands.

She likes princesses and Elmo right now, but I can already tell she's going to have good taste.  Just the other day, she pulled The Quotable C.S. Lewis and The Agony and the Ecstasy off my shelf.  Oh, Lucy, you make my heart swell,

even when you insist on sitting right on top of it.

I guess what they say is true...

the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

another incredible story...

A team from our church here in California left this past Saturday for Haiti.  My dear friend Carly Peters and her husband, Sean, who is the associate pastor at our church, are a part of the missions team.  They'll be serving at an orphanage and they are keeping a blog of their experience.  If you'd like to follow along, you can read it here.


Carly is friends with a woman named Debra, who adopted a boy from Haiti a few years ago.  Debra's story is so moving, and Carly gave me the link to her blog (which I love!) back in January, when Chris and I were starting our adoption journey.  Anyhow, Debra is the one who told Carly about this particular orphanage where our church is now serving, a place called Danita's Children.  Please watch Danita's story below, it is so inspiring...

Also, you can find the Danita's Children website here.  The need is great...perhaps this is a place you might feel led to get involved.  


I hope that one day...when our lives are a little less transient and our children are a bit older...when I can get my nursing license up and running in one state again...that Chris and I can do a medical missions trip(s) to a place like this.


Just wanted to spread the word...

under my skin

The good thing about crying at the gym is people can’t tell if you’re wiping tears or sweat from your face, if the salty, streaming fluid is coming from the eyes or under the skin.

Sometimes all the imperfection gets to me, the dead ants in the corner of my desk, the breakfast oatmeal caked on the kitchen table, the invincible black mold at the edges of the shower floor, the way we have a hard time looking one another in the eye and saying what we really feel.

Sometimes I wonder if PMS is merely what happens when a perfect storm of monthly hormones destroys our usual filters, allowing these buried desires, anxieties, and irritations to flow freely to the surface.

I read in a book that God has given all women holy longings for relationship--but these longings don’t always feel holy to me.

I think I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to be someone other than myself.

“Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.” --Bryce Courtenay

One cup of coffee no longer cuts it in the morning.

I bought a bar of dark chocolate and a bag of cheese puffs at the grocery store today.

In a pride of lions, it’s the female, not the male, that runs the show.  Turns out that heavy mane is just fluff and pretense.

God guided the Israelites with cloud cover by day, fire by night.  There has been no cloud cover, no rain here in over two months, and it’s the bright moon in a dark cloudless sky that lights our nights.

Why does everything have to mean something?

The AmTrak that runs through the fields behind our house severed a utility truck in half last week, sliced it right down the middle as if metal was butter.  I don’t know what happened to the driver.  It turns out that even red flashing lights malfunction.  Sometimes the warnings never come.

The daisies I planted in window boxes this spring didn’t survive the summer.  I plucked them out of the soil and threw their burnt bodies in the trash, replaced them with heartier begonias. 

I identify with daisies more than begonias.

“What I don’t understand is the beauty.”  --Dean Young

The colors grey and yellow, what an unlikely pair, an unexpected yet perfect marriage, coolness and warmth, the sun peaking through rain clouds.

Listening to Bon Iver puts me in a better mood every single time.

Of the five states I’ve lived in during the past decade, California is where I feel most like myself.

I’m afraid of living in the same place for the rest of my life.

How much longer can the human race go on like this before the ground falls out beneath us?

“It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs.  In the world of imagination, all things belong.” --Richard Hugo

voice

“Every once in a while you read a book so good you want to run around the neighborhood, waving it, yelling, "This is it! This is it!" On everyone's shelf, there are those one or two books we keep going back to, keep opening up while the others stopped blooming long ago. Why is it we connect so strongly with some books and not others?” --F. Montesonti

The sentences above were the opening lines of the first lecture of my poetry class.  The theme of the entire class was “voice.”  Mainly, what makes a voice compelling, what aesthetics are we drawn to in a text, which voices do we feel are kindred to our own...and why?  We spent the entire two months of class addressing these questions as we studied a wide array of different voices. 

I think most people would agree that a successful piece of writing is one that they can see themselves in. It’s easy to identify the books and authors we like, but harder to understand why we like them. I believe that unveiling the “why” behind this is a worthwhile endeavor, as it teaches us more about who we are, what our passions are, what message we uniquely feel compelled to communicate to our world, and how we wish to convey it.  

One of the writers I connected with powerfully during the course was Linda Pastan. Pastan quit writing poetry for an entire decade in order to raise her family--a decision she wasn’t happy about--but she felt she couldn’t do both...it was all or nothing. When she started writing again in her thirties, she wrote largely about the domestic scene, and her writing is proof that the mundane, ordinary aspects of life provide sufficient fodder for successful writing, which is good news for me. 

Pastan’s writing is clean and concise.  Every word in her poetry has a purpose. There is no excess, no clutter--each word has to be there. These aesthetics appeal to the minimalist and purist in me, however, under the surface of her simple diction lies the deeper theme within her poetry. In an interview with PBS, Pastan stated that she’s “always been very conscious of the fragility of life and relationships.” This fragility is laced throughout all of her poems, and I think this is why I feel so drawn to her, perhaps because I also find myself overly aware of how tenuous and delicate the balance of life and relationships are...of all the dangers that lurk under the surface of normal, daily life.

The thing about kindred voices is that they give us permission to be ourselves. They tell us we aren’t alone in the world, that there are others out there who experience life in the same way that we do, that ask the same questions, have the same fears, obsessions, and passions. Writing is a risky endeavor. Speaking, saying something close to our hearts, is a risky endeavor. It takes courage. Those brave hearts that are willing to step out on a wire give us the courage to do the same--to be who we are.

This whole thought process reminds me of a book I read last year called Permission to Speak Freely, by Anne Jackson.  She writes,

“Confession by its simplest definition simply means speaking truth or agreeing with what is true.  Sometimes the truth takes ugly shapes, like when we sin or when we’re violated or betrayed by another person.  But other times, truth is something beautiful, and it’s important for both kinds of truth to be spoken.”

In one of her essays, Anne Jackson talks about “The Gift of Going Second.”  This is the gift that we give someone when we go first in confessing truth about ourselves, when we break the silence.  Anne writes, 

“If we can find the courage to confess something, even to just one person, the long-term effects of that confession can move others into rediscovering their faith and their freedom.”   

I think this is why it’s so important for each of us to use our voice in the world.  We each have the power to help others find their voice just by using our own.  I think this is also why it’s so important for us to find kindred voices--those voices that give us courage to speak because we know we aren’t alone in our confessions. There are voices out there that give us the gift of going second, that inspire us to use our own, and when we do that, we can then pass that gift onto someone else.  It’s like this unending chain reaction of discovery and freedom...though not without risk or fear.

Who inspires you to use your voice?  

What story is uniquely yours to share with the world?  

Who are the kindred voices in your life?

What books do you keep going back to on your bookshelf, and why?

an over-generalized, philosophical rant

Sometimes I feel like I am one person.

Sometimes I feel like I am one person.

Last night I was up late. Once a month, thanks to hormones, I struggle with insomnia. Tess also vomited in her bed last night, so I was up anyways doing laundry at midnight, and I had a hard time settling down enough to go to sleep. As usual, I found myself camped out at my computer in the early morning hours, catching up on social media and news.

I read an exceedingly disturbing article about the famine in east Africa and took those images to bed with me, woke up with them in my head. Parents are being forced to leave their small unconscious children on the roadside so the rest of the family can press on to seek food and water. How could any human being be forced to make that decision, a decision that will haunt them the rest of their lives? People are faced with this type of dilemma daily, a reality that is horrific to even fathom.

When I read about things like this, I can’t help but feel small and powerless. I want to do something to help, but how can one person touch suffering on that scale? I am not God. In the midst of where God has me now, what can I do other than pray?

When I read things like this, I question why He has placed me where He has, in this material abundance and wealth, with this voice, these passions and desires, this family, these friends, this story, raising these children at this point in time. Why here, why now? I don’t know that the answers to these questions even matter, or if they'd change anything, but I ask them nonetheless.

In the meantime, I recognize that in my small sphere of life, I feel like I make an impact--at least, most of the time. I feel like I matter to my family and my friends.

I don’t think anything I’m writing in this post is new. Themes of impact and significance whirl through a lot of my blog posts, which is reflective of the struggles that surge through me on any given day.

Who am I?

Who did God make me to be?

How does my life reflect Him?

How will He choose to use me?

How has He made me unique?

While there are some tangible things I can identify in response to these questions, most of the answers feel abstract, yet I consistently find myself attempting to fit them into defined boundaries, into a finite room with four walls, a floor and a roof. I ascribe labels to myself and think I need to fit within the confines of those labels. I fall prey to prescribed images and start to fret when I don’t measure up to them. I construct this idea of how God wants me to be and how He can use me most, only for Him to throw me confusing curve balls that render my preconceived ideas useless. 

He tells me I don't belong in that confining box.

I am different.

So are you.

That’s a good thing.

I suppose that also means we should stop comparing our differences.

I think we all carry around this shame of either being too different or too ordinary. The “too different” category resonates with me, and I find myself constantly seeking to filter out little parts of how God created me in order to fit into mainstream Christian America. I think that we internalize this unspoken rule that in order for God to use us, we need to run in certain circles, to talk a certain way, to have certain hobbies or interests. If we can cram God’s calling for our lives into a black and white, concrete thing, then we can have something tangible to prove our worth by and hang it high on a flagpole for others to see. 

But that’s not how God works, is it?

I read this a few days ago and I’ve been mulling it over ever since:

“At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God’s purpose is--"I am meant to go here or there," "God has called me to do this special work"; and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains. The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God.”  --Oswald Chambers.

Along these lines, I’m also reminded of a Dan Allender quote:

“...our calling is not what we do--it’s how we do it.”

And this one is good too:

“We do not know what God is after, but we have to maintain our relationship with Him whatever happens.” --Oswald Chambers.

God doesn’t seem to discuss His purposes with us. I think He guides us gradually into them, but we never know what the final outcome is or what it will look like. Perhaps the outcome is a moot point to Him. He's more concerned with the relationship with Him...not the externals we seem so obsessed about.


***BTW...just wanted to say, as of today, we are officially DTC (Dossier To China)! It's on it's way to Beijing right now!

pom-poms for poetry

I finished summer school just over a week ago, and since then, I've been getting reacquainted with my home, my family, my friends, and the other business of life that's been neglected since the beginning of June.

Last week was a hard transition for me. I was relieved to be finished with class--it lifted a large load of stress off my shoulders to no longer have assignments looming over me each week--and yet I also felt like I was mourning the end of such a wonderful, powerful experience.

I went into this class expecting to meet a requirement. I needed a poetry class before I could start my thesis in literary nonfiction. I was originally signed up for the regular seminar in poetry, but ended up volunteering for the advanced workshop in poetry--a class designated for students doing their thesis in the genre--as the class would cancel if more students didn't join.  

During the first week of class, I was pretty intimidated--peeing my pants, to be more precise. I'd messed around with writing poetry on my own before, but there was no method to my madness. I'd never taken a formal poetry class, and was rather ignorant about contemporary poets.  I was excited about taking a class with our professor--Frank Montesonti--who is the head faculty of our entire MFA program, and who assured us rookies that we could hang with the advanced curriculum.

Well, long story short...at about week five...the half way point...something started to shift in me. To put it bluntly and over-dramatically, I started to fall in love. As I became more entrenched in this new and excited genre, I started to feel as though the poets we were reading experienced the world in a different way than fiction/nonfiction writers, and that perhaps they held the world in a fashion more similar to myself. Their writing didn't consist of sweeping narratives bound together by plot and character. They focused in on the simple moments of life--the moments that so many of us miss on a daily basis--and they explored how these moments are significant to life itself.

By the last two weeks of class, I was engaged in a full-fledged identity crises. A dangerous little voice inside was rooting wildly for me to switch my thesis genre from nonfiction to poetry, but I resisted her peppy cries from the bleachers. I hissed, "Sit down, little girl. You're changing the plays, and you're not even a part of the game!"

My game plan all along was to do literary nonfiction as my area of focus. For my thesis I was going to write a New York Times bestseller, a personal memoir, a tale of my military nursing days, my deployment-stay-home-mom nightmare, all woven in with our adoption journey. It was going to be brilliant, a real page-turner. It was going to be selected for Oprah's book club and read by housewives across the globe! (Feel free to laugh at my delusions of grandeur.)

Only...I didn't want to write it. The deeper I sunk my teeth into poetry, the more the idea of writing this book felt like drudgery.

I started praying about this decision, and that little girl I mentioned before--the one sitting in the bleachers with pom-poms for poetry--she started getting really obnoxious, out of control.  She started doing splits, hand stands, even back handsprings. I couldn't calm her down. It was a lost cause. 

Then I "accidentally" stumbled upon a book that was released last month--a memoir about a wife whose husband was deployed in Iraq for a year. She cowrote the book with her husband. It suddenly appeared that my original idea had already been done before, and how could I really compete?  Her husband was deployed an entire year, which would make my complaints about a three-month deployment look petty. Plus, he was Army, not Air Force, which further enforces the pettiness of my complaints. Oh, and did I mention that her family has also adopted?

So...all the signs stacked up...and after some intense conversations about the big switch with several trusted sources, I decided it was silly to try and fight it.  

Poetry it is.

RA RA RA!

It turns out that I only need to take one extra class in order to do my thesis in poetry. The next class offered starts in November, but we might be traveling to China while that class is going on, so most likely, it will still take me a few years to take the final four classes I need to finish this long-drawn-out degree. I'm in it for the long haul though.

Some people might not understand my hesitation to make the big switch to poetry, might not get why it felt like such a big deal to me. 

But let me ask you this...

How many poets do you know?

How many people do you know who actually read poetry?

How many people do you know who make a decent income from writing poetry?

How many Christian poets do you know?  

Isn't that some kind of oxymoron?

What images come to your mind when someone says the word "poet?"

Are you're thinking of that guy in a coffee shop, chain-smoking cigarettes, sporting a scruffy beard, a beanie hat, a black trench coat, who looks like he could use a shower or five, and drinks his coffee strong and black because he likes it intense, just like he is?  The one who's off in his own world, brooding over his paper and pencil like the world is hanging on his sentimental thoughts? 

Well...to tell you the truth, that's what I envision when someone says "poet," and I didn't want to be placed in that confining, marginal box of society, even if I do have an unbridled affinity for strong coffee, brooding, and all things melancholy.

So, I suppose the point of this post is to share more of what's going on with me, literally, or literarily, or something like that, and to officially come out of the closet and say...

i love poetry!

I love to write it and read it and may some day want to teach it! And maybe that means I'm a bit eccentric, a little "out there," a strange bird, but so be it. In case you haven't noticed, I've started a little poetry page on this blog--upper right hand corner.  It's still in the works. I'd love to just post all of my favorites here on this blog, but that could be a major infringement on copyright laws, so I'll just have to try to link up to what's available online. I hope you'll check some of the links out--there's a lot of pleasure in poetry.

More to come about this. There's some fun stuff to share about what I learned over the past couple months, but for now, I need to bring this post to a close. Thanks for reading, if you still are...this poetry post was quite a novel. :-)

Piles

Do you ever feel like your life looks like this photo?  

Chaotic, a bit dysfunctional, like you've got your hand in too many bins, like you try to file things away in neat little containers, yet piles remain that you just don't know what to do with?  

Yesterday morning I started a massive project--one that I've put on the back burner for quite some time. I decided it was finally time to sort through the excessive number of storage bins in our garage and start the big purge. 

Several bins were full of maternity clothes, post-partum clothes, and clothes I wore before I got pregnant with Tess. Each frock charts the extraordinary amount of expansion and retraction the female body does in order to grow and sustain life. I sorted through bras ranging from a deflated size 34A (barely there) to rock hard 36E (wowzer), pants ranging from size 2 to size 12. Then I opened another can of worms--the bins containing the girls' clothes--and another sense of wonder struck me as I tried to imagine their current bodies fitting into newborn onesies. 

I dumped all of the clothes out and started to sort through them. By late afternoon I was surrounded by cascades of clothing, trying to fit them into different categories.

I had separate bins for 2T, 3T, 4T, and 5T girl's clothes. I set aside two bins of clothes for my friend Carly to take to an orphanage in Haiti. I smiled as I imagined these clothes being worn again, half way around the world, by little girls who don't have much of anything.  

By the end of the evening, at least eight massive black trash bags full of clothes for Goodwill lined the hallways. I started a separate container of maternity clothes to give to some of my local preggo friends. I had a bin of formal clothes I wanted to keep, but they need to be altered. 

I came across all of my scrub hats from my OR nursing days, the pair of red Dansko clogs I wore only in the operating room, which treaded daily on a mixture of betadine, bleach, and human blood. I wondered if I'll ever wear those hats and shoes again. I stored them in the bin for keeps.

This morning I dropped off a trunk full of clothing to Goodwill--literally, stacks of black trash bags busting out of my SUV. Dropping off those bags gave me a sense of finality, like the file has been officially shut on past chapters, case closed. It was something tangible to remind me that God has us on a different journey now--one that does not require these particular clothes to give and sustain life.

A few nights ago Chris and I were chatting on the couch.  I was complaining, which is customary for our late night chats, as I'm too tired at that time of day to think positive. I told Chris how fragmented I feel, like there are too many parts of me involved in too many things, which leaves me feeling like I'm a jack of all trades, master of none, uncommitted, spread too thin, and ineffective in any of my endeavors. And yet, I sense each thing in my life is there for a reason, but I struggle with not knowing how these different parts of me fit together...or if they ever will.

As I sorted through the bins yesterday, I found myself wondering if God has accidentally put too many passions in one woman, too many dreams for this singular heart to hold well. Sometimes I wish God would let us have it all mapped out, to know which containers are for what, to allow us to never have piles with big question marks on the exterior. I wish He would tell me how parts of my past will be used in my future, how the stacks of items I'm giving away will be used for blessing, which items I need to hold onto and those that belong in the trash. Sometimes I wish I only had one bin to deal with--how much easier it would be! I wish we lived in a perfect world where my foyer--and my self--never looked as dysfunctional and disorganized as it did yesterday.

But this is how life is. Entropy. Clutter. We have worn piles of clothing, still beautiful and useful, that we've suddenly outgrown. And there are other piles still, that we hold onto because we know we will still need them, but don't know how that will look.  

Oh, the mystery. Oh, how He weaves beauty from our collective dysfunction and chaos. Oh, how much we have to give away from the abundance He's already given. Oh, how He never gives us easy answers. This post kind of feels like the big blob that lay in my foyer yesterday, but I'm too scattered to try and make more sense of it. Oh well.

At least one thing is for sure.  

It's time to buy some BOY clothes.

have you ever

Have you ever done anything for the plain ol' pleasure of it, unobstructed by should's or would's, could's or if's, not for some ulterior motive or grand chance at success, not for physical survival or to serve a greater good, not to boost yourself up high by people's fleeting approval, not even for practical, reliable common sense, but only for the primal, selfish, raw, giddy joy of it?


Have you ever done something because your curiosity got the best of you, leading you into a mystery that you didn't quite understand but had to see for yourself, something that you weren't quite sure you'd fit into, something that was foreign and exotic, something you could see yourself a part of but didn't quite know how or why?


Have you ever made a decision that would determine a long string of future consequences that you can't even begin to fathom, but today, for some reason, perhaps the faint stirring in your gut or the subtle and inexplicable tug of the heart, nudges you to utter a "yes" to the thing you don't really know what you're saying "yes" to?


Have you ever pondered the scale of failure your "yes" is setting you up for, the magnitude of risk you've willingly flung your delicate psyche into, the invitation for others to deem your efforts magical or minuscule, how the unsympathetic floor will feel when your body pounds into it, and if you will be strong enough to get back up when that happens, because it is bound to happen?

The Road to Ren

Where to start, where to start...

It's been exactly three weeks since my last substantial blog post, and so much has happened since then, so please let me back track a bit and bring you up to speed on what's been happening! This back tracking will need to happen in a series of posts, but let me start with an update on the adoption front.  

The last time I wrote, I filled you in on the drama with USCIS and how disheartened we were with bureaucracy and indefinite wait times. Well, just one week after I mailed out our revised home study to CIS, we got our approval letter!  

It came rather unexpectedly, three Saturdays ago. I was having my Red Tent girls over for dinner (another post on that later), and Chris brought the mail in just after we'd finished eating. I was clearing dishes from the table and Chris nudged me and pointed to an opened envelope on the kitchen counter. I looked down and saw the words "Department of Homeland Security." I looked up, my eyes wide, my jaw hanging down, searching Chris's face for some sort of clue--Is this it?  Is it already here!?!  He smiled and nodded and I grabbed the letter and scanned it for the only word I needed to see: APPROVAL. And there it was, in black and white, and I started laughing and crying all at once.  

My dear friend Carly, who has a gift with the camera, was in our kitchen when this was all going down, and she started shooting away.  My joy, my relief, my uncontainable emotions, captured candid on film, thanks Car!

It was so much fun to have my girl friends here to join in this celebration with me. They have listened as I've shared my deep fears and joys at the dinner table, and it was special that I could share this milestone with them.

After the ladies headed home, Chris and I popped open a bottle of Prosecco and clinked our glasses together, grateful to be one step closer to our son.

Frizzante!

Toast to Ren!

The following week proved to be a bit insane. I got our approval letter notarized that Monday, and then, of course, we found one other glitch on a financial form that required a notary to witness Chris's boss's signature. After pulling a few strings, we got that worked out, and finally, on Thursday I was bound for Sacramento,

to the notary department at the Secretary of State's office, where our entire dossier was to be state certified.

It took me longer to find a parking place than it did to get our paperwork certified. Thirty minutes and two hundred and seventy dollars later, I was walking out of there, our dossier finally complete!

It was a beautiful day, and I even got to see the pristine monument of bankrupt California!

That evening, Chris stayed home with the girls so I could take over the copy machine at Kinko's. Before I left the house, Chris took a picture of me and my pregnant paper belly.

I was specifically instructed NOT to take any staples out of the original documents, so I got to fold each individual document back to photocopy one at a time, careful not to obscure the state-certification seals I had just paid big bucks for. Two hours and several trees later, this fat stack lay before me...

I nearly had a panic attack as the Fed-Ex clerk pried seven months of paper gestation out of my hands to put in an envelope. Tiffany, our China case manager, said that never in her six years at AGCI has she seen a dossier get lost in the mail, and I prayed to God that ours wouldn't be the first.

Still, despite my angst, I felt a massive sense of release as I walked out of Kinko's that night. Mailing off our dossier marked the end of a significant portion of this journey, and the beginning of yet another stretch of road ahead. It also freed up a substantial chunk of space on my desk!

I got a call from Tiffany early the following week. She sounded excited and perky--far more enthusiastic than I was used to. She said our dossier looked perfect and she was stoked because usually she finds a few glitches. She also said it was already on its way to the Chinese Consulate in Washington DC, where it will be authenticated. This process usually takes 2-3 weeks. After that, it will cross the big blue Pacific en route to China, where it will be translated and then hopefully accepted, after which we will receive our monumental "log in date," which gives Tiffany access to view all the children in the databank of waiting orphans on our behalf. She expects our referral to come at some point this autumn.  

Just before we hung up the phone, she said, "Well, your wait has officially started!"  Huh? Just now? I thought. What about the past seven months...doesn't that count too? 

But then it struck me that we had suddenly been filed into a new category...a category where we are taken far more seriously...as if the seven months of paperwork was some sort of testing ground to see how committed we really were to this adoption. I suppose they have a lot of drop outs during the paperwork phase. We were in JV, but we've just moved up to Varsity, baby!

So here's to the next leg of this long road to precious Ren!

Thanks for being a part of the ride with us, for your prayers that sustain us and your encouragement that refreshes us!