What would you do?

If you need to catch up, you will want to read the first part of our story here.

For the last two years, as we felt that God’s plan for our family included adoption, I have had a vision of a little girl with brown skin.  I had no idea if that was just my heart wishing for a daughter, or a true vision (like the kind in the Bible), but it’s been there the whole time.  Time after time we would get phone calls from our domestic adoption agency asking us if they could show “our profile” to a mom who was considering adoption.  And every. single. time. the woman was pregnant with a little boy.  Not once did they ask us about an African-American baby girl….  but still this sense I had kept lingering.

So there I am, standing in my family room, speaking with an incredible, inspiring woman (think Mother Theresa in Haiti), and learning about a little girl who could potentially become our daughter.

“Would we consider adopting her?”

The first thought I had was “YES, YES, YES!  A thousand times, YES!”  In that moment nothing seemed more obvious or simple.  We’ll just adopt a child from Haiti!

Ha!

Then I hung up the phone and reality settled in….  Nothing about this new scenario made any sense.

Adopting internationally is hard.

Adopting internationally is expensive.

Adopting internationally from HAITI is very, very unpredictable.

We realized almost immediately that we wouldn’t be able to pursue both adoption scenarios…  our domestic homestudy requires that we be the family that they describe.  No new additions, no change of address, no change of jobs.  The homestudy needs to be consistent with our circumstances.  So we couldn’t just add a new baby to the equation and expect that they wouldn’t notice!

We would have to walk away from all the money we had invested in our domestic adoption (almost $9,000).  And the money we have been saving to pay for the remaining cost of our domestic adoption will barely cover half of the new expenses we would have to incur.

On top of all that, we would have learn an entirely new process all by ourselves.  No placing agency to hold our hand every step along the way.  And the entire application had to be translated into French!

Yet despite all these realities, there was one more factor which made all of those hesitations seem like it might be worth it…

a little boy with beautiful brown eyes who has stolen our heart. 

You see, not only do we have the chance to adopt a little girl, we have the chance to adopt a toddler boy too!  And that just seemed like it might be too good to be true….

You can continue reading about our story here