To My Lucy

Dearest sweet Lucy-

Today is your 1st birthday. Happy Birthday! We celebrated your special day in our home. Your Grandma Penner came over for supper. (Grandpa Penner flew to North Carolina to spend some time with your cousins, Grant and Wesley, and your Uncle Aaron and Aunt Karen.) We sang Happy Birthday to you and your brothers blew out your candle. It was a special day here and I hope and pray that it was a special day for you in China.

Lucy, I have not known you for very long and I have yet to hold you and hug you, but already you have a very special place in my heart. My desire to be with you in person grows each day. I imagine what the day will be like when I do finally get to hold you and learn about your personality. I dream about what the future holds for you. I imagine the day when I find you and your sister giggling in your room and me having to go upstairs and tell you it is time to go to sleep. I look forward to Ian and Aiden showing you around your new home and around all the places to explore on our yard. They are excited to tell their friends about you.

I pray for you daily, if not more. I pray that you are safe, healthy, and growing. I pray that God is preparing me to be the mother I am called to be to you. I pray that you receive Jesus as your Savior and Lord at an early age and that you live in the confidence that only He can give you. A good friend of mine made your sister a memories box after she was born. On one side of the box there is a verse that I just love and pray for you and Isabelle:

"She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future."       Proverbs 31:25

  Oh Lucy, you are so precious to me and I love you! Happy 1st birthday dear one!

Love,
Mommy

Here are some pictures and video from today's party:

 O.k. so I was a little rushed to finish your cake and it kind of fell apart! It was a butter cake with a whipped topping/pudding filling and chocolate chip/chocolate frosting. (I'm pretty sure you would have liked it.)

 And the cake just kept falling apart as we cut it, but hey, it kind of looks like a cake after a 1 year old is done with it. : )

                                    
 Ahem! We do wear clothes in our house. We just had lasagna and I didn't want Izzy's WHITE shirt to get sauce on it. Lucy, your sister is already excited to share a room with you.

We all love you and cannot wait to share your next birthday and many birthdays to come with you blowing out your own candles.

Presenting Lucy Fei......

June 13 - I recieved an email today and I would like to share the first line of the email: 

"Hi there and congratulations!  Today we received your pre-approval from the CCCWA!"

 So what does this mean? I cannot word it better than the way it was explained in the email, so I should just quote directly from the email:

"A pre-approval is essentially the CCCWA’s acknowledgement or confirmation that your Letter of Intent has been received, along with the basic family information and photos you provided, and it represents the CCCWA’s agreement to review and process your file through the expedited Waiting Child Program, once your dossier arrives.You are now welcome to send a care package to your child and can share with others at your own discretion."

 Did you read that last part ?!!!! We can send a care package to our little girl in China! We can share pictures and details with you all! This is a good day! Recently Jason and I were at a wedding talking with a couple whose daughter just brought home their China doll. We discussed the ups and downs of this whole adoption process. I think back to over a week ago; how down and dreary this whole process looked. Now I am receiving the good news that we are another step closer to bringing Lu Lu home. We ended the conversation at the wedding by saying, almost simultaneously, that this whole process is out of our control. We realize there will continue to be ups and downs during this process. We will celebrate the ups, like today, and we will grow and trust fully in the One who is in control during the downs.

So without further delay, I would like to present to you Lu Fei Hu (Chinese name), Lucy Fei Penner (American name), Lu Lu (nickname : ))

   Believe me, one of the first care packages I send will include some hair bows! : )

So, what are our next steps? We are meeting with our home study agency for the first of 2 meetings on Wednesday. We will also be working on all the dossier paperwork. We now have a deadline to get our dossier completed within 6 months. On Aiden's birthday, Decemeber 13th, we need to have our dossier completed in order to meet that deadline. Game On!!! : )  However, first we need to plan a birthday party for Lucy. She turns 1 on Thursday, June 16th. It will be a bittersweet day in our family! I so wish that she could be here to celebrate this great birthday with her family. I hope the caregivers take time to celebrate her birthday in our place.

On another note, last night Jason and I were doing a search on the orphanage where Lucy lives right now. We discovered that almost one year ago, Show Hope (Steven Curtis Chapman's organization), opened a special care unit in the same building as Lucy's temporary home. http://blog.showhope.org/2010/07/09/jiaozuo/ This orphanage is only a 1 1/2 hour drive away from Maria's Big House of Hope (for those that have read Choosing to SEE by Mary Beth Chapman you know what I am talking about). We are going to see if we can visit these places while we are there. We are wondering if Show Hope had anything to do with getting Lucy's cleft lip repaired. Hmmm? Something we will have to ask.

As always, Soli Deo Gloria!

Be Careful What You Pray For......

June 5 - The past two months have been a waiting game for Jason and myself. We are not only waiting on our little girl in China to pick up and bring home to be a part of our family, but waiting on calls and emails from a company that Jason has been interviewing with. After months of uncertainty and changes with Jason's software consulting job, we started thinking  it was time for Jason to pursue other job options. However, the bad part is that while we are in the middle of the adoption process, we have been advised to not make any MAJOR changes to our lives. A major change being defined as a job change or address change looks bad on our dossier paperwork and will just cause problems and delays. Since we were not far enough in our adoption process, i.e. our homestudy and dossier is not completed yet, we felt we needed to look into this option. We put a halt on our adoption for Jason to pursue a different job. That was a little over 2 months ago. During this 2 months I have had CCAI asking me for paperwork that I could not fill out until we knew where Jason would be working. I have had our homestudy agency emailing me asking where were in the job pursuit so that we could schedule our homestudy meetings. So after almost 4 interviews and 2 months of time a proposal was given to Jason on a job and it was not what we were expecting. It was disappointing. The entire 2 months I just ached in my heart thinking our little girl is waiting for us and we are holding up this process. O.k. God, what are you doing? Why? Are we doing something wrong?
This brought us to a place of pleading and prayer, asking God what we were to do. Should Jason stay with the company he has been working for not knowing when the next paycheck will come, (One of the changes that has taken place with his job is that he gets paid when clients pay so we went nearly 3 months before seeing a check.) or cut a huge chunk of our budget, perhaps sending our kids to a different school, and take this new job, also knowing it is going to take more time from our adoption to get information sent off about this job change. Pleading and prayer, I tell ya! Finally, on Friday I came to my breaking point. I literally wept for our daughter in China. I was ready to tell CCAI that they should find other parents for her because we cannot give them answers and paperwork they need right now. I was weeping nearly the entire night ready to give up the little girl I feel God has called us to bring into our family. Just a side note: I started teaching summer Sunday School and a verse we talked about today was Psalm 30:5b "weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning." I lived the verse out. That night I wept and wept. What are we to do? How can this be part of Your plan, Lord? Then it came to me, and this thought has come to me before, but it was very clear now. You see it takes a few times for something to occur before I REALLY GET IT! From the beginning of this adoption journey Jason and I had prayed and asked others to pray that we would remain humble throughout this process. Adoption, being such an open and visual process, can become a very prideful and boastful thing to the parents. People come up to us and say, "oh what a wonderful thing you are doing. Good job." We never wanted this to become anything we have done but what Christ is doing through us. We want His name to become famous through this, not ours. I think of the verses in Philippians where Paul talks about putting confidence in Christ and not our own flesh. "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ." Philippians 3:7.  I think the Lord was putting us through this entire holding process to keep us humble. There is absolutely no way we are doing this ourselves, but He who works all things to His glory. He is keeping us humble. On Saturday morning Jason and I sat down, prayed, and talked about what we needed to do. We both came to a unified decision that Jason will continue to work for the consulting group he has been working with and we are completely trusting that God will provide what we need. Jason will do this until this adoption is complete and we have our little girl home. In the midst of all this possible job change there were more opportunities that had come up. Keeping this current job gives Jason some flexibility to possibly pursue those opportunities once our little girl is home. After we discussed this decision and went on with our day, I felt peace. I cannot speak for Jason but I think he felt the same. Jason went out to get the mail and came in with a check from his consulting work. HELLO!!!

So, I sent off an email to our homestudy agency to set up a meeting and get our homestudy done and I was able to send in all the information CCAI needed to lock us in as parents of little Lu Lu (our nickname for our China doll). As I like to say, GAME ON! We will now be busy doing whatever needs to be done to get Lu Lu home. So be careful what you pray for......you may just find yourself in unchartered waters. : ) The second part of Psalm 30: "rejoicing comes in the morning" came as I drove to the Butterfield trail later on Saturday morning. The song "I Lift My Hands" by Chris Tomlin came on the radio. I was by myself and cried tears of joy. Listen to the lyrics and be blessed. 

Soli Deo Gloria!