This is reposted from my post this week on MomLifeToday. We weren't actually able to file the paperwork at the embassy upon our visit, but plan on doing so when we arrive back in Uganda.
I am, as they say, “paperwork pregnant.”
It wasn’t coursing hormones or a full bladder that stirred me this morning at 5:06, but a chirpy text alert from my cell phone: My lawyer letting me know my file was, at long last, complete. Sinking back on my pillow, sedated in a thick haze of half-sleep, I felt my mind drift to that moment when we will finally get a call to come meet our little girl. And that was it, folks. My mind is now fully awake, ready to blog to you.
Today, after nearly nine months of waiting, my husband and I will weave rather perilously through Kampala traffic, bypassing a few OB-GYN offices on our way to our city’s U.S. embassy. We will place our hands on electronic fingerprint sensors and turn over a steep amount of cash. We will present a stack of identification, along with a photocopied, long-awaited home study representing months of slightly intrusive questioning regarding the suitability of our family and home.
We will then hand through the window advance paperwork petitioning the U.S. government to pre-approve us as adoptive parents. Then it’s two more months of waiting as our envelope makes its circuitous way to Nairobi, then back to Uganda, at which point I hope to accept it with a pudgy, African hand encircling my index finger.
Folks, we’re having a baby.
…I hope.
I was realizing this week that with my other four children, I have prayed for them, for their spouses, for their walk with God since the moment I saw a faint pink line appear on that fateful stick of white plastic. For this child, too, I have petitioned God—sometimes silently, sometimes aloud—as I pray for my other children, picturing her fuzzy African head and soft, chocolate-colored shoulders bent over whatever toddler activity in which she might be engaged at the moment.
Lord, help them to treat her kindly in the orphanage, especially so she can have healthy relationships later. Help them to feed her well so her brain can develop. Prepare her heart to adore you. Watch her for me, Lord. Please be her Father while she is fatherless.
But after so many months of waiting and so many exasperating, often humbling, lay-my-head-against-the-wall-and-sigh hurdles, I must admit...
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