Dossier in the Hands of the Minister

OK....now we wait...our dossier was delivered to the Minister of Gender and Family Promotion yesterday. Hard to believe we may have our son within a couple months.

Gaoyou Girls 5th Birthday Celebration

Ellena, Lara, Lian, Isabella, and Sarah. To see these girls now, four years after their adoption, is to grasp a vision of hope, courage and love. It is sometimes difficult for me to balance just wanting to be a mother to my daughters, and not think of them as orphans, with the realization that the orphan crisis is only growing and that my two daughters are two of the 143 million orphans in the world. Each orphan has a name. Each orphan has beauty inside that these girls capture. Each orphan deserves to be loved and not forgotten.

The members of our adoptive group gather each year to celebrate our girls birthdays. We do not gather to focus on what would have happened. Instead we gather to focus on what is and what will be because these girls are our precious children. But I know that I can work on a professional and personal level to make sure that more children receive the blessing of family. Adoption represents less than a tenth of a percent of orphan care. While I wish everyone could experience the miracle of adoption, I also know that reality says we can't wait for that to happen. We have to ensure that the children who are without families receive its blessing in other ways. That's why I am on the board of Children's Hope Chest (www.hopechest.org). Our friend, Tom Davis, who is its President also writes a blog on these issues - http://www.tomdavis.typepad.com/.

We celebrate these beautiful little girls and the young women they are becoming. And we pray and act for the ones who are left alone.