Meet Isabelle

Unfortunately, we have our posts a little bit out of order here. Greg posted earlier today about some encouragement we received during the first few days if Isabelle's adoption, and now I am writing the post that formally announces that adoption. I guess it is just more evidence that we still aren't very good at this whole blogging thing, right. :)

As Greg said in his most recent post, we have been convinced for a while that God was calling us to adopt again. We looked through many different lists of children, and fairly quickly narrowed our decision down to four children. Then, it took days of praying, talking, thinking, reading, and praying some more before we finally chose our daughter. She is a little girl in China who will be three years old next month, and like Mikaela, she has Down Syndrome. The initial uncertainty was a little strange for us, because with Mikaela's adoption, it was clear from the very first time we saw her that she was supposed to be ours. Even though it took us a lot longer to make the decision this time, we both felt completely confident in it once we did decide.

Our next step was to choose a name for our new daughter. Even that was harder this time around. We both looked at this little girl's picture and felt that she needed a name that was very soft and feminine, and we both liked the names Isabelle, Sophia, Lydia, and Alayna, but couldn't seem to come up with the right combination of first and middle name. On Saturday afternoon my parents kept our four kids, and Greg and I sat down at Panera, each with a copy of a baby name book. We read though the girl sections from beginning to end, and did finally find a name that seemed perfect for our little girl. We chose Isabelle Noelani (No eh LA nee) which means "beautiful girl from heaven, consecrated to God." This seems like the perfect name for this precious child that God has given to us, while also reminding us that she ultimately belongs to Him.

The next step in the process is to submit our packet of information to China to request their pre-approval to adopt Isabelle. We are almost finished filling out the forms, but we won't be able to submit the packet until we have the $1300 fee that goes along with it. We are praying that God will send that money soon, because until we have that, we can't even officially begin her process. We know that the timing is all in His hands, but it is so hard to wait when we want so badly to bring this little girl home.

Isabelle's picture is attached below. This photo is about a year old, but we don't have anything more recent right now. Isn't she beautiful.

Kristie

Mikaela can sit up!

Mikaela hit a big milestone this past week. She can sit up all by herself now! We are so proud of her. We have been hoping that she would be sitting up and crawling by Christmas, and she just might make it. She spends a lot of time on her hands and knees, rocking and looking around. Sometimes she even takes one to two "crawl steps."

Mikaela at Halloween

It is late, and I need to get to bed, because the kids wake up early, but I want to post a few pictures of Mikaela's first American Halloween.

She was a little cowgirl, and she had a great time.

It was cold that evening, so she spent the whole time wrapped in a blanket, and no one even saw her costume. I guess it is a good thing we got pictures.

She is getting so much stronger! She could not push up like this a few months ago.

Here she is with her Daddy. This is the only shot we have of her full costume.

This is my favorite shot from the evening. She isn't usually this serious, but this is a great shot to see how pretty she is.

These are the pictures that should have been included in the most recent post. I don't know why it didn't work the first time.

This is Mikaela during one of her breathing treatments.

Mikaela and Gabriela with their grandparents

Mikaela playing pat-a-cake with Great-Aunt Bev

Mikaela, Gabriela, and Josiah with their little cousin, Jason

Although life is very busy with three children under the age of three, Mikaela continues to thrive and grow. She is still gaining weight and is just about on the growth charts now. Cognitively and socially, she is pretty much at an age-appropriate level, although very near the bottom of the range. Verbally she is very, very slightly delayed. Her motor skills still need a lot of work, but she is making progress in those areas as well. We are so proud of her, and both forget that there was a time when she wasn't part of our family. We made a trip out to PA to visit with Greg's family, and it was her first big road trip. She did really well for about four-and-a-half hours of the five-hour trip. The last half hour was really hard on all three kids, and both girls screamed pretty much the whole time. Once we got there, they all did great. Mikaela was a huge hit with extended family members who hadn't had a chance to meet her yet, and I am including some pictures of that trip. Mikaela caught Gabriela's cold right about the time we got to PA, but she was a good sport about the stuffy head and runny nose. While we were out there, however, Mikaela developed a very bad case of croup. We spent most of the night up with her trying to decide if we needed to take her to the emergency room. Finally between steam and cold air, we did manage to get her through the night, but she didn't ever recover like she should have. Once we got back home, we took her to see the pediatrician, and we found out that we had a pretty sick little girl. Mikaela's cold had turned into an ear infection and resulted in some fluid in her lungs. In addition, she was still struggling with the croup. They put her on three different types of medication, including breathing treatments with a nebulizer and told us to come back in a week. Fortunately, that did the trick, and she is now fully healthy. We are so happy to have our happy, healthy baby girl back with us again. We also had Mikaela dedicated at our church this past Sunday. She had been baptized in her home country, so our church decided to dedicate her instead, re-affirming her previous baptism, emphasizing our responsibilities as her parents, and welcoming her into our congregation. It was a very nice little ceremony. I don't have the pictures of that yet; I think they are on my Dad's camera. I will try to get them soon.

We are still here

Hello to all. As we mentioned back in May, we decided to switch over to a private blog while we were in Europe so that we could share the details of Mikaela's adoption a bit more freely. We did maintain that blog while we were in country, so if you did not get the login information for that and would like to read the details about our trip, feel free to email us at 2polyglots@gmail.com, and we will be happy to send you the login information. Now that we are home, we can go back to using this blog. Our goal will be to keep both blogs updated, so most of the posts will be identical. To bring you all up to speed, I will give a really quick summary of the last few months.

Near the end of May, we flew to Eastern Europe. As we shared with you then, we were still short of the funding that we needed, and we were trusting God to provide everything for us. We are convinced that we were right to follow God even without knowing where His provision would come from, but we realized shortly after arriving in Europe that we had been very wrong not to communicate this information to our facilitators. We had never intended to be dishonest, but by not telling them how far short we were of the funds that we needed, we put them in a very difficult spot and jeopardized Mikaela's entire adoption. As a matter of fact, one of our facilitators told us that if we could not raise $7800 that day, he would send us back to America. We were devastated. We had already come to love Mikaela like our two bio children, and could not stand the thought of loosing her. We called my parents and begged them to pray, and they sent out an urgent plea for help. We couldn't imagine any way to raise that much money in one day, but God is very gracious. The members of our church banded together to raise that entire amount, and other friends and family raised the rest of the funds that we would need while we were in country. Rather than being angry with us, Reece's Rainbow even helped us raise a good bit of the money that we were lacking. We were so humbled and awed by God's mercy and the love that His people showed to us. We will never forget His goodness or the lessons that he taught us that day. Once we got through that initial crisis, we had a wonderful time in Mikaela's home country. We have wonderful memories of almost every day, and I am already wanting to go back. I think it will take Greg a little longer to get there, but he had a wonderful time too. The food was delicious, the people were kind and gracious, and the city was beautiful.

We returned home on July 2, and Mikaela has slipped into American life like she has been here from the beginning. She is a delight and a treasure. We can hardly imagine life without her. She has seen quite a few doctors since coming home, and most of the news has been very good. She had no parasites, no hepatitis (A, B, or C), no other diseases, and her heart condition seems to have resolved itself without surgery. We are so thankful for this. She does have hypothyroidism, but that is easy to control with medication. She is gaining weight and getting happier every day. She celebrated her first birthday on August 1, and we are so thankful to have been able to share that milestone with her.

That covers the highlights, and I will include a few pictures of our beautiful girl if I can figure out how to do that. Okay, I did get the pictures to post, but they are at the beginning, not the end of the blog. I have gotten so used to Wordpress, that it will take a little time for me to adjust to blogger again. Sorry about that. From now on, we will try to post all updates on both blogs.

Praying for the Lord's Provision

This has been a rather difficult week for us. As we have mentioned before, one of our central prayers over the past four-and-a-half months has been that God would provide funds as we need them, and that nothing about the adoption would be delayed even by a single day because of a lack of money. As we have also said before, He has never failed to answer this prayer. The closest we have ever come to being unable to complete a step because we couldn't pay the required sum was back in February when we were preparing to submit our application to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) for permission to travel outside the country for the purpose of completing an adoption. (For all of you adoption veterans, this was the all-important submission of the I-600A.) In that particular instance, He sent us the money the day before we needed it, giving us just a little bit of breathing room. Part of us longs for that kind of comfort right now.



We received notice of our first appointment in Mikaela's home country two weeks ago today, and we have been praying earnestly since then for the rest of the funds that we will need to complete her adoption. For days, nothing happened, but we didn't panic because God had shown Himself so faithful throughout this whole process, and because we knew that we didn't have to act immediately. We were extremely grateful when several donations arrived late last week, even though we were still considerably short of what we would eventually need. But we knew that we still had time before the money would actually be needed, and so we again did our best to remain patient and wait on the Lord's timing. On Monday morning, we both felt very peaceful and upbeat about everything, until we saw that there were still no more funds for Mikaela. Then, the urgency of our need descended upon us, and it became very difficult not to despair. We set aside some time that morning to pray together, and by that evening we were both doing better, although our desperation had become acute. God encouraged us again through some friends of ours who have been an incredible support over the past few months, and we awoke on Tuesday morning feeling very encouraged. That was the case all the way through yesterday afternoon, but when yesterday evening arrived and God still had not sent anything major, despair began to set in again. We began this morning in a hopeful mood, but that dissipated quickly when He again was silent. That silence temporarily paralyzed us, as we didn't know where to go. We have been diligently and earnestly—though by no means perfectly—seeking His will, especially over the past two weeks. Repeatedly we have sensed Him telling us simply to wait for His timing, and His history of provision served to encourage us in waiting. And we are not talking only about His past dealings with us during Mikaela's adoption, but His faithfulness in continuing to provide for the work of The Shepherd's Crook and His great faithfulness to His people as recorded in Scripture. And now, it seemed that our attempts to follow His leading had led us to a dead end, with no visible way out. We still cannot imagine how we are supposed to finish this adoption and bring Mikaela home, but we know that she is our daughter, and thus she belongs here with us and not in the orphanage. So, we are moving forward, even though we don't know what God has in store for us. His silence from earlier today is starting to lift, and so we are taking the next steps. We are going to book our flights tonight, and we are praying earnestly that He will continue to supply what we need from this point forward. It's more than a little scary to take such a step into the unknown, but as this is where God is leading us, there is nowhere else for us to go. We would not turn our back on our daughter, and we would not refuse to follow the Lord. It's not for us to know how He is going to work in the coming days; our only duty at the moment is to trust and obey.



Please pray with us that our Heavenly Father will graciously supply what we need to bring Mikaela home. It's not easy to trust Him in the midst of such an intense trial, but that is what we are to do. If the Psalmists and the author of Lamentations can praise God out of the depths of their despair, then certainly we ought to do likewise. So, please pray also that we will not harden our hearts, that we will honor Him in how we conduct ourselves, and that our trust in Him would not give way to hopelessness. We are asking Him to open the flood gates and pour down on us what He knows we need. We are praying for a miracle.



For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,

for my hope is from Him.

He only is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my salvation and my glory;

my mighty rock, my refuge is God.

Trust in Him at all times, O people;

pour out your heart before Him;

God is a refuge for us.

— Psalm 62:5-8



In Him,

Greg & Kristie



Tax-deductible donations may be made towards Mikaela's adoption by sending a check made payable to The Shepherd's Crook Ministries to P.O. Box 773, West Chester, OH 45071, or by using PayPal on-line at www.theshepherdscrook.org/donate/now/. Just be sure to designate the funds for Mikaela Colleen Godwin.