The Morgan Family

Friday, July 12, 2013

A long awaited blessing...

I have waited a long time to write this post.  And some would expect that it would be so filled with joy that you would want to gag!  Trust me, it is.  We are OVERJOYED to share with you that we have received a referral for a little boy!  He is just a bit younger than Jack which is what we requested but not by much!  In fact, we will be celebrating his birthday without him soon (but you can imagine what a birthday he will have once he gets here)!  I wish I could show you a picture of his beautiful face.  However, until we come home, we will call him baby J and I will not be sharing any pictures online.  I can tell you this, because of his age, we have decided to keep his given name (but it does work out well because it is a "J" name too)!  So we will not be calling him James as previously discussed, and you will hopefully learn his real name soon enough!

When I saw his face, I almost cried.  I couldn't believe it.  I think I was in shock.  We were actually out of town that weekend.  We were staying with friends, Jack was staying in the same room as us, and he hadn't slept well that night.  It was 5:30 in the morning and Jack was trying to crawl into bed with us...I was resisting this with all that was within me because I knew at that point it was all over and none of us were going back to sleep.  Since I felt this was inevitable, I grabbed my phone and took a look...and there it was.  An email from our point of contact with his beautiful picture, name, and a (small) snippet of information about him.

Ok, now I have shared my joy with you, but please, bear with me when I share the rest of my heart. Over the past year, our eyes have been opened to the joys and sorrows of international adoption and while we are ecstatic to have a referral, we ask that you pray harder now than ever.

As we've stated time and time again, our number one priority is the welfare of children, orphaned or otherwise.  In the US, there are pretty clear standards as to what makes a child "adoptable".  Not as much the case in many international countries...especially non-Hague countries.

We have received a referral directly from a babies home instead of from our agency.  We have chosen not to work with our former agency however we believe that agency is still amazing and working for the best interest of children in Uganda.  We did not choose to move forward with them for many reasons which I would be more than happy to discuss, but not in a blog.  Just note that we would be very happy to work with them again, and to recommend them to families looking to adopt in the future.  It's just not the route we are taking for us for now.

We have a referral.  But now is just the beginning.  The waiting will still continue and now is the waiting that is the scariest for me.  As a mother of a beautiful two year old ginger, I go through a range of emotions regarding adoption all together.  How difficult it must be to give up your child for adoption.  How you must run through a plethora of reasons and wonders as to the right decisions for your child.  So many coercive people and pressures in other countries.  The horror stories I've heard from other adoptive families.

Here's where we stand.  We are walking through the process with our babies home, our lawyer, and some amazing and supportive friends God has placed in our life (some of which who have or are going through this too).  We have been working to get everything together to submit for a court date.  This has included our lawyer in Uganda speaking to the living family members of the child referred to us.  At any point in time, if any one of those family members speaks up and says they want to care for the child, we will lose the referral.  Of course that would be heartbreaking, we already love this child and want him here with us.  Yet, while we are torn by our emotions, we would never want you to pray that his family doesn't want him.

Next we wait on a court date and once we know that, we know when we get to travel!!  I may or may not be writing between now and whenever we travel.  Communications at this point get iffy because in reality, this is not our child until we have legal guardianship in Uganda.  This means talking about him in any sense can put our case in jeopardy.  Once we travel we will be setting up another means of communication while we are in the country and at that point, if you are interested in getting our updates, I'll publish how people can contact us for access.

So hold on to your butts!  It's about to be a wild ride!!  We covet your thoughts and prayers!!