Loving Lila

I recently posted about a major decision Jon and I made about adding to our family. If you haven't had a chance to read it you can find it here. I wrote about that decision and how it was the culmination of months of research and prayer but let me explain how exactly we got to Lila. Please be patient this is a little lengthy.

Jon and I said when we first married we wanted four children. Then I got pregnant with Zoey and the thought of being pregnant four times wasn't so appealing. Don't get me wrong I loved the end product but the process was not my favorite. After Zoey we began flippantly throwing around the idea of adoption. It was never discussed in depth because we were knee deep in babies. After Thad was born the idea briefly resurfaced but it wasn't until this past summer that our talks came back full force. Once the idea was planted the signs were EVERYWHERE and I do mean EVERYWHERE. I began doing what I have to do with every big decision, research..research…research. Then Seth's eye happened and even though I continued to research any action we were going to take was quickly put on the back burner. If you don't know what I'm talking about with Seth's eye you can read about it here and here. We agreed to decide on the timeline of starting the process after the first of the year and then Lila came along.

When I was pregnant with Thad we didn't want to know his gender. Even though we were pretty positive he was a boy, we still liked the element of surprise. We picked out two girl names (you know, just in case) and those two names were Lila and Liza. Well we had a Thad and those two names were tossed aside.  When we started talking about international adoption and settled on China, we thought the name seemed more fitting for a Chinese baby girl than Liza. So we had a name for our eventual baby girl. 

It was Wednesday, December 21st, Jon's birthday and we were in Lawrenceburg for the holidays. I was looking at the advocacy site Rainbow Kids and there was Lila. No really. Due to privacy, Chinese orphans' names are not given out until they find their forever family. The name the agency was using to refer to her was LILA. Now, if you don't know anything about Chinese adoption let me give you a quick run down. Several years ago the Chinese government realized it was was probably in their best interest to not adopt out all of the healthy babies. So to adopt from China now you have to be willing to adopt a "special needs" child. We knew all of this and honestly it doesn't scare us. Our boys would both be labeled "special needs"in China. Most of our children would fall under this category. When we started our adoption discussions we just figured we would fill out our medical checklist and then wait for them to match us with a child we felt "comfortable with." Well when I saw Lila's profile and read about her needs I kept wondering why she was still available Why someone hadn't snatched her up? I sent her info to Jon was out with my Dad and then we decided to email her agency.

Shortly after I emailed I got a response back with her privacy file. Her file included basic information about where Lila was found and her general medical report. We talked about it amongst ourselves for several days and then agreed to wait until after the holidays before we made any decision. The problem with Lila's file is it was listed with a different agency than we had originally thought we would use. Her file was assigned to our new agency and would remain only with our new agency for at least a few months. The longer I thought about Lila the more I worried she would be adopted by someone else before the agency had to send her file back to the shared list. That thought was too much and Jon and I decided on Christmas Lila had to be ours. So here we are. I will do my best to keep anyone who is interested up to date.