My Overthinking

Philly Area mom, Life forever changed by adoption

Thursday’s Things to Pray For

  1. Thank God that the kids enjoyed our visit to MD and that Lydia did well with the change of scenery. Pray that she “recognizes” home today as we get back to routine and that she connects well with Mark again. She did not want to go to him last night after being away from him for a few days.
  2. Pray for increased business for Jiayin Designs. The woman I am helping to run it recently found out that she is expecting! This is very exciting, but all the more reason that I’m praying the business really increases for her so that she can provide for her family well through it. We’re working on adding a few more items to the website. 
  3. Thank God that we’ve seen such maturity lately in Evan. Learning to swim this summer and passing that swim test was huge for him. We have seen him grow in so many ways because of his increased confidence gained through that. We are so thankful for that.
  4. I started Beth Moore’s devotional 90 Days With the One and Only. Pray for consistency in doing the devotions and for my eyes to be open to what the Lord wants to teach me through it.

If you want to join up and post requests on your blog too, let me know. I’ve figured out how to do it but want to see if there’s any interest first.

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Fun in MD

I’ve been a little more quiet on the blog than usual lately because we’ve been hanging out with my fam down in MD. I brought the kiddos down here on Sunday (enjoy the silence at home, Mark, while you still have it!), and we’ve been doing fun stuff around here for a few days. Here are some highlights (I’m leaving out the picture of my parents’ new ginormous tv though we have several pictures that the kids insisted on taking…maybe those pics are worthy of their own post really).

Lydia and cousin Audrey seriously working out hydro-engineering issues in the water play area at the MD Science Center today.

That’s my mom. She can’t see her hand in an optical illusion. She found this much more interesting than my kids did who tend to have some serious attention issues at places like this, just racing around to the next thing.

My dad, cousins Bohdan and Maddie, and Drew floating in space. Wonder how many strange people wore these suits before they did. Ick. Oh well, gotta let that go a little in the name of fun….right? Please affirm me before I wake Drew up right now and make him wash himself one last time just to make sure he’s totally clean.

Evan here totally digging the tornado simulator. He’s smiling, but he’s thinking, “There’s no place like home.” Actually, that’s probably not at all what he was thinking since he is a total museum lover.

Drew and cousin Bohdan standing in a model of a dinosaur nest being dinosaurs. Two 4 year olds, dinosaurs or not, could be pretty scary if you ask me.

Granddaddy and Lydia. Just a sweet moment together caught at the computer simulating the movement of the Earth’s platelets…or something like that.

Evan admiring a pirate ship riding around the harbor. Right after this picture was taken, the woman on board in full pirate character yelled, “Ahoy, Landlovers!” while the kids on board tried to shoot us with water canons. Scallywags.

Even after a long day at the Science Center and walking around outside, I’ve got the cutest kiddos ever. Unfortunately, Lydia had succumbed to sleep in the stroller by the time I took these pictures. Boo. I would have loved pics of all 4 of them like this. They are seriously adorable.

By the way, anyone close enough to the Science Center in Baltimore who reads this and has a Chinese child (or will soon!), I recommend the Sesame Street planetarium show. It had a Chinese Sesame Street puppet in it who taught some simple Chinese words (including Yue– the word for moon and part of Lydia’s name!) and sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Chinese–which totally captured Lydia’s attention. As soon as the puppet was done, she started clapping! Not something that might sound impressive, but she didn’t care one bit about the English version. No applause at all. But, the Chinese version made her pretty happy. I wonder if she had heard it before?

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3 years

July 23rd, 2007 is the day the office in China that manages all the adoptions for the entire country logged our application to adopt a little girl into their system. This date (our Log-in Date or LID) was our identification in our wait, what connected us with other waiting families (I felt at times like I should wear a tshirt that said “7/23/2007 — what’s your LID?”)

In 2007, July 23rd came and went. We didn’t yet know it was our LID. On July 27th, 2007, Sarah called us and told us that they got word that we had a LID of 7/23. I then wrote the following in my journal:
“…I can say with authority that God called us to this and so forward we go. The wait will be a long one, but at least we can do it with confidence of our calling.”

July 23rd, 2008, a year later, we celebrated the anniversary of our LID with take-out Chinese by candlelight. I wrote a post about the things I had learned that year. We were learning a lot and steadfast in our call to adopt. But, I was frustrated at the lack of progress we could see in our wait. About that time, I wrote in my journal:
“I still like to imagine what that day will be like when we receive a call that our referral arrived. I imagine everyone huddled around my computer waiting to see her picture and then clapping and crying when we see her cute, pudgy cheeks and her tiny frame under layers and layers of puffy clothes. I wonder if she’ll have hair or any teeth yet? Will she be happy or have a sad, serious look? It keeps us going imagining…”
Of course, our referral day was not what we had imagined (you can read about it here), but it was just what God knew it would be all along.

July 23rd, 2009 we had dinner with Mark’s sister’s family. The 23rd is after all our niece Emory’s birthday as well. We had gotten word earlier that month that our paperwork, nearly 2 years later, had just been reviewed. That day, I wrote a rather therapeutic blog entry about the benefits of waiting. On March 10, 2009, we had joined the special needs program. So, by July 23rd, we were anxiously waiting to review files for children who might be ours. I stalked online sites about when a new list of available children for adoption would be posted. I longed to know when the wait would end and when we would see our daughter’s face. In my journal, I wrote a prayer out:
“Give us certainty, clarity, discernment, and wisdom as we look at files….I trust that you have the one already set apart for us. Help us to recognize her as ours when we hear about her on the phone, when we see her picture for the first time, when we read her medical info.”
I had no idea, nor would I have imagined, that our daughter was born on March 10th already, the day we joined the special needs program.

On July 23rd, 2010, today, we now have our baby home. We spent the evening with old friends tonight, some friends we haven’t seen in a very long time. We were all a part of a newly married small group ministry at our church 9-12 years ago. What used to be a newly married group now are marrieds with a whole lot of kids. So much fun to talk about Lydia and China (sorry to those of you I may have over-talked with!) and see her toddling around, so wonderfully fitting in as one of the group.

For so long, this date–7/23–has been a significant one to me. I don’t think a single July 23rd will go by without me remembering what it once meant to me. But, now, we have new dates to celebrate–the day we joined the special needs program and the day Lydia was born, the day we saw Lydia’s face for the first time, the day we got her updated information and laughed in delight knowing that God had answered our prayers in such a specific way, and the day we met Lydia face to face and she became grafted into our family as we are grafted into His family.

Thank you, Jesus.

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