You may remember...(part 1)

that in this post here, number 9 mentioned we had other news to share. As of today, we are now able to share our glorious news!!

WE HAVE A DAUGHTER!!!!

Introducing Sophia Senait who was born in Ethiopia.

We do understand that this is a shock to some. Last year, God made it clear to us that our daughter would not be coming from China. Our sons would be from China, but our daughter...well, she would be from somewhere else in the world. Where we still did not know but we felt a tug in our hearts from Africa.

When my mom had her stroke in July, we were certain her time on Earth would soon be coming to an end. She continued to pray that she be allowed to see all of her grandchildren that God had planned for us at least once. She would jokingly say many times - especially each time we told her of her newest grandson - "when are you going to adopt a girl?". But, once she saw the faces of our little men, she would immediately say we have to get them home as soon as possible because they were a part of our family. During an especially difficult time with her health, I knelt and prayed that God complete our family as soon as possible so my children would have the opportunity to know there Memaw. Later that day I spoke with my mom on the phone. After hanging up I heard God's voice say "Ok Sheila, it's time to find your daughter".

Admittedly, this both thrilled and freaked me out. What God was asking...no telling was for us to begin concurrent adoptions...that means adopting from China and "somewhere else" at.the.same.time. Are you kidding me?? We were already stretched adopting Sawyer so close on the heels of Simon. (For those of you keeping up with the timeline, yes, this is before God chose us to adopt Shepherd!) But, we had already learned through this adoption process that the very act of faith was one of jumping off a cliff with no idea what lay below. God, however, has caught us each and every time.
All of this praying and freaking out led to us doing a lot and I mean a lot of research on other adoption programs. Each and every time, however, we would come back to Africa and then to Ethiopia. There is a lot of controversy in the international adoption world right now. Controversy which centers around baby stealing, selling children, marketing children for profit, etc. We are not oblivious to this and no country is immune, even ours. To that end, we pledged to research our agency options thoroughly before diving headlong into an Ethiopian adoption. Our China agency had a program, but we did not feel led to adopt with them in any other program but China. We interviewed several agencies and spoke with several families across the US who had adopted from these agencies. We settled on our current agency with a Christian base and real people who had adopted internationally so truly understood the process.
We updated our homestudy and filed additional paperwork with USCIS. Then Mom had open heart surgery, the slowdown in Ethiopia hit and God sent us on the road to Shepherd and we thought, hmmmm, did we take the wrong "call" and misread God's intentions for our life? We resigned ourselves to waiting it out. We were strapped financially trying to pay for 3 adoptions at the same time and thought maybe God was giving us a breather...and He did. Until the day before we left for China.
I still remember our agency director calling, asking how I was, asking how things were going and then saying a bunch of stuff I don't remember because all I heard was "Are you interested in seeing the file of a baby girl?" My heart stopped. Was I, really? We were about to leave for China to get not one, but TWO boys. Are we really ready to see/take on/fall in love with a daughter at the same time? YEP!!! Oh, and by the way, did you notice her Ethiopian name begins with an "S"? Talk about a God wink!! But, there was a catch...of course. If we accepted the referral one of us may have to be in Ethiopia for court on June 17th. I looked at the calendar. We weren't coming back until June 10th. Holy macaroni! So, I talked to Scott and he said in his silver lining, trusting in God relaxed manner, "If this is our daughter, God will help us figure it out". And He did.