One month ago today at about 10pm, we saw our daughter Lydia’s face for the first time. Here is the first picture we saw. We are guessing she was about 4 months old in this picture since that was her age at the time the paperwork was completed. She certainly was a teeny tiny peanut, don’t you think? I think my first words actually were “Wow, she’s teeny!” Here are the other pictures we received at the time.
Now, a month later, we’re counting the days until we get our Travel Approval (TA) so that we can buy some plane tickets to bring her home. It’s crazy to think that 1 month and 1 day ago, we were wondering if we’d ever find our Chinese daughter. Then, God miraculously brought her to us.
Today, we sent off a care package to her orphanage. I hope it makes it to her. We included a handful of goodies–snacks for the orphanage staff; bubbles, books, sidewalk chalk, stickers, and 4 pairs of pajamas for children; a disposable camera for the staff to take pictures of Lydia in the orphanage, and a photo book of our family for her to see us for the first time. I often consider how we all have memorized her photos and are so busy preparing for her. Yet, she has no idea who we are, what we look like, where we live, or even that she has a family waiting for her at all. Even though she is only 11 months and 8 days old, I hope that her nannies show her the album and talk to her about how much we love her already. I’m hoping she won’t be as scared when we meet her if she has seen our faces already. Here are the photos I included in the album. I had a friend help me with the Chinese characters to label all the pictures for her nannies to read to her.
This has her Chinese name, her new name, and then it says “We love you!”
The characters with Evan’s name mean “big brother.”
The characters with Ashlyn’s name mean “big sister.”
The characters here mean “our family.”
We thought the staff may like this picture. The characters at the top say “our house” and the other characters say “the park near our house.”
Sending the package and imagining her seeing her family for the first time has been a blessing to me today, particularly in light of the fact that I hit a big pile of plowed snow today while making a right turn and seriously damaged our car. Yup. That’s what I did. The snow pile was more like a boulder. I didn’t damage the pile of dirty snow one bit. It was rock solid. Just did a number to the right side of my van, the entire length of it. Yup. (sigh)