Who is that?

We sit and we wait...and wait...we forget that we completed our home study a few months ago....we forget that we are adopting.  Friends and family ask for updates on our adoption.  Adoption.....oh yeah.  I forgot.  Umm, well things were moving fast until now.  We received a letter a few weeks ago indicating everything was approved by Immigration.  All that means is our forms were sent on to our agency to begin the process to find a match.  We wonder if our child has even been born....if it will still be a year or longer before we will hear anything.  Or maybe our child is born...and they will be 3 years old by the time we can bring them home.  Meanwhile, we have biological children at home that are growing up.  They are entertaining and interactive.  I'm just getting used to balancing Stimson's questions and his stories, biking, and analytic mind with Merritt's independent, daring, 'supervision-required' lifestyle.  I am a guy....and it is hard for me to multi-task....listening to Stimson's complex and detailed questions while rescuing our daughter who has managed to climb up anything she can find.  Now adding a third?  And what age will that child be when that time comes? Will they also ask the same questions or will they be daring or what will their personality be??

As we await the adoption process to run its course, I often think back to various points in this journey where we have been nudged forward towards adoption.  In this moment, I think back to when Stimson was celebrating his 2 1/2 year old birthday.  We do celebrate and make a bigger deal out of his 1/2 birthday since his birthday is on Christmas Eve.  (Maybe that is because my birthday is around that same time and I still think back to the combo gifts I got at that time of the year when I was younger and the parties that were difficult to have with friends since they were home on Christmas break.) It is also much nicer to celebrate in the summer with his friends, as the kids can play outside.  We invited several of his friends....and some of mom and dad's friends, including a family that had recently adopted from Ethiopia.  At that point in our life, we had seriously considered adoption but were not at a place where we were ready to take the financial and emotional plunge.  Back to the birthday....those friends of mom and dad showed up with their white biological child and their adopted Ethiopian child.  Living in a very white community, Stimson had very little exposure to other races.  This Ethiopian child (very cute) walked in and Stimson's 2 1/2 year old mouth dropped.  He said "Who is that?  I'm not playing with him.".  At that point, Katy and I both looked at each other and said "We are adopting.".

Adoption for us is more than doing something that sounds cool or noble.  It is not something that we are doing so we can unload some cash....after all we are still picking up pennies to get closer to our goal.  Adoption is about rescuing a child, loving a child without love, feeding a child that doesn't have food, teaching ourselves and our kids that life is not just about us...doing for one what we wish we could do for a world of less fortunate children.  It is about having a multi-cultural family and having that be ok and normal.  We have a lot of unknowns related to our multi-cultural family and we expect to be answering that question ourselves - "Who is that?"