Follow Our Journey to Maia!

Hi, everyone!

You're invited to follow our journey to Maia!



This will be my final post on the With Open Arms site before we leave for China on Monday morning. I wanted to let you know that we'll be blogging and posting pictures on Maia's China site, www.journeytomaia.com. This is the special China adoption website I started years ago, and it's very China friendly! I think you'll like how easy it will be to check in on us and Maia. Please go to this site and click on the Travel Logs button to follow our journey to sweet Maia! I created a hyperlink, so just click on the website address above.

I've already posted our itinerary to give you a good idea of where we'll be while we're there. Each day, we hope to journal and post pictures of the day's happenings, especially after we receive Maia on the 19th! Keep in mind there's a 12-hour time difference. They are ahead of us by 12 hours.

Love and blessings to all!

Ben, Emily, Ava and Maia

Two and a Half Days Until Departure!

Hi, everyone! We are two and half days before departure and counting! I'm running final errands with Miss Ava today, and I have two bags packed under forty lbs - in-country weight limit! Of course, they are the smallest bags, but still! :) It bolstered my confidence. Amy, I got the almonds in my carry-on!

I found this article in TIME magazine and thought I'd post it about China's One-Child Policy. I get asked this question a lot, and I thought this was interesting. What it doesn't mention is that currently, families are fined about $30,OOO if they break the one-child policy rule according to their family status. That's more than many families make in four years! I'm happy to see that they're relaxing the policy a bit. It will be interesting to follow the new pilot programs.

"The Chinese government is beginning to rethink its famed one-child limit as it begins to lift the restriction in five provinces with low birth rates.

The pilot projects, which are set to begin in 2011, allow for a second child per family if at least one spouse is an only child. USA Today reports that Beijing, Shanghai and four other provinces will follow suit in 2012, with nationwide adoption of the new policy expected by 2013 or 2014. In 1979, China's one-child policy was introduced after decades of huge population boom followed by mass death due to resulting food shortages. The policy, which has prevented 400 million births, restricted the country's ethnic Han majority to have only one child per family (exempting most ethnic minorities) and has remained nearly the same since, though a few exceptions have been made. (Some rural farm families have been allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl.)

A wide gender imbalance, as well as the need for more children to care for parents, has likely influenced the government's tight control on the country's birthrate.
What the article describes are some incremental changes. The rule already allows more than one child when BOTH parents are only children, now it seems they will allow it when only ONE parent is an only child. Incremental change, but a good change nonetheless."

The Dream

This next post has been tucked carefully in my heart for many years now, and up until July 15 of this summer, faith made a light to follow on the long and often arduous journey to our baby girl in China. Faith has become my eyes now, and I want to share this special post with you and ultimately with Maia. I will tell it just as it happened.

I'm not sure of the date. I know that it was after 2002, likely in 2003 or 2004. We had lost a baby in March of 2002 at 10 weeks and were entering into an unanticipated eight years of waiting for children. "The Lord gives His beloved sleep," and how desperately I wanted to just sleep peacefully during those years and the aching and longing of my heart vanish when I awoke. The Lord was with me in my rising up and in my lying down and during all the times inbetween, much closer than I could possibly imagine with my limited vision and understanding during that time. Oh, if our eyes could be opened like they were for the servant of Elijah! What great and mighty things we would behold around us.

I had a dream, rather I believe that the Lord granted me a special dream during the waiting years. I have only dreamed this once, but I remember it as clearly today as when it came to me in dream. The Lord still speaks in dreams. I'm not one that would say that He uses that method often with me, but I don't limit Him and I never know what or whom He's going to use on this life journey to speak to me. Like Mary long ago, I've pondered this in my heart many times, knowing in my heart that Lord revealed a piece of His plan in the middle of the ache and the long-suffering and the "endless" waiting.

I was in a room, and the only thing I remember about this room were three things. In the room, I was standing holding a child in my arms. I remember this child being Caucasian, and I don't know if it was a boy or girl. I remember holding this child for awhile in my dream and having peace. I turned to walk out of the door in the room, and what happened next is still a mystery to me in many ways. Part lies hidden behind the veil in Heaven for my eyes to behold someday, and part lies seen here on Earth.

Before I left the room, I looked at the child I was holding and sat him or her down. I didn't see my child on the floor. I just remember sitting them down. That was the last time I saw the child. I then turned away from the door and looked at a bed, and in the middle of the bed on a comforter was a little girl with black hair and she was tiny.She was bundled. I peered down at her and reached to pick her up. That's all I remember.

As I try my best to interpret this dream many years later, I understand more fully that the Lord was asking me to surrender my plan, my child, to His care. I was laying it down and reaching for the Lord's plan for my family. I had to give my desire for a family and the loss of our baby to the Lord in order to find what He had planned for me. Knowing how great my heartache was during that time, the Lord tended to my heart and was patient and tender with me. The fulfillment of this dream or vision would have to wait many more years, but I truly believe the Lord allowed me to have this dream to keep in my heart, waiting on its fulfillment in the appointed time. That's why I have the verse from Habbukuk at the top of my blog. It's become one of my life verses that I've clung to all this time, largely because of this dream.

Maia is the baby I reach for now, knowing that El Roi, the God who sees, sees me and sees Maia, no matter how great the distance, and He knew the appointed time that we would find each other.

In the Lord's time, the vision did not tarry.

Referral Package Day!

Amid all the hustle and bustle of this summer, we got the referral call in the quietness of a Thursday afternoon July 15th. Words exchanged quickly were soon followed by the original medical and social report and pictures of sweet Maia from China! We had to wait over the weekend to receive these, and I missed the UPS man when he left the packet. When I arrived home that day, this is what I opened the door to find. Our referral packet for Zhuang, Lu Ti, Maia Grace! We signed our Letter of Confirmation as soon as Ben got home and put it in the mail to our agency to then mail to China the very next morning. The faster we could get the LOC to China, the faster we could get our Travel Approval to come and get her! We've signed an insane number of documents throughout the last four years, but this one was the most anticipated!

A "Wild" Birthday!

Ni hao, everyone!

We are seven days and counting to our flight to China! I have a few more posts from the summer I'm trying to get up before we leave! I have a little time while Ava naps today and while I take a break from my ever-shortening "to do" list. I really want to take a nap, but I'm forcing myself to stay awake as I hear it's not good to nap before the East! Packing is going well. Ava is almost completely better, and I had a crazy virus over the weekend that a Z-pack knocked out thankfully, so we're playing catch up around here on this Labor Day. Still leaving on the 13th for Beijing! I still can't believe I'm writing that! We're bringing Maia HOME!

On the 17th of July, my family drove up to our favorite mountain spot at Metcalf Bottoms to celebrate my birthday, and we were all in for some "wild" surprises. Never in my whole life growing up here have I seen what I'm about to show you. Maybe a few crawdads and trout in the river/picnic area, but that's it! During the few hours we were there, we saw a water snake catch a fish and eat it, a black bear get in the water a few feet from where we were playing in the river and a rattlesnake on a log near a well-traveled tubing path in the woods! We kept saying that we were going to see wild turkeys, a boar and a mountain lion next! It was crazy. We got some great pics of the wild animals we did see. We had a great time that day, and a few of the pictures show my aunts, Jill and Syd,and my cousin, Katie reacting to the news of our referral of sweet Maia! There's quite a few pics, so I'm going to try to get them loaded off and on throughout today. I may or may not have time to do captions but the pictures speak for themselves! :) Here's to fall weather, finally!

Water Girl!

If we didn't know better, we would think Ava had gills! We were headed out the door to church on Sunday morning a few weeks back, and this is where we found her!

Packing Like Crazy, Crazy Like Packing!

Hi, everyone,

First, Catherine! Yes, I got your comment and I was so excited to see Austin in my box! I'll e-mail you soon, ok? Can't wait to catch up. Please tell Tim I said, "Hello from Monday." :)

I have been away from the blog for several days since the retreat, and a lot has been going on in our household! When I came down off of the mountain, literally and figuratively, chaos began! I came home to Ava having a 104.4 fever, of course, late Sunday night, and the nurse advised us to bring her on the Children's if it got close to 105. Well, thankfully, her fever broke and we were able to tuck her in bed with her penguin humidifier very late Sunday night. We had tried the Infant's Motrin alternating it with Infant's Tylenol every four hours AND a sponge bath or two, and nothing was helping to bring down the fever most of the day. Crazy virus I'm guessing. Monday, she woke up and felt much better and her fever was completely gone by Wednesday. She had no other symptoms but a high fever. Go figure!

Since then, I have been a crazy woman packing and making lists for China! I need to tell you guys, though, that something bizzare has happened on my playlist! Number three is NOT the Britt Nicole song that used to be on there! It's some weird heavy metal just odd song. THANK YOU KAREN! Hopefully, you guys just skipped right over that or thought I was a weirdo one. I took it off tonight.

On another note, we had a small crisis in our family tonight. Ava was missing her purple blanket, and I knew that she had left it at preschool. This is her number one comfort item, and she is not fooled with the pink one, even in the dark. I had gone back to the church earlier today and "searched the world over," to no avail. Later tonight, I reached her teacher and she told me to look in the stove. I remembered that the kids have a play stove with all these drawers and doors. When I got to the church, Ava was balling at home with Ben, and there was only one lonely car in the back of the parking lot. I thought it was a lost cause, but much to my surprise, the door opened! That never happens this late at night. So, sure enough, there was the purple blanket stuffed in the back of the stove. Everyone in our house is sleeping better tonight.

Lately, I've needed a gigantic purple blanket for comfort as I try to get all of this China stuff together! We leave the 13th and have asked sweet Brynnan Webb to house sit for us. Every day, I'm marking items off of a long list of to dos, and if you've e-mailed, called or texted me, I promise that I've received each and every one. I just have not had a single second to respond. Thank you so very much for encouraging me/us. We need it right no as the time draws nearer.

Since I've blogged, we have found out that we will have Maia on the 19th of September, and because that's a Sunday, her orphange director will bring her to the hotel in Nanchang where we'll be staying! I can not imagine standing there in the lobby waiting for her to be carried through that door. They may come to our room. Not sure at this point. We plan to be up and blogging the whole time we're there and I'm planning to use the journeytomaia site to chronicle the last leg of this journey. That's the site I began with, and it's going to be something I'd like to keep for Maia in hard copy. Plus, there is a massive firewall in China, and I think it would be easier for me to use this site. As it gets closer, I'll give you instructions on how to "follow." I so need to buy waterproof mascara!:)

Also, some of you are leaving comments and blogger is moving them to a spam folder and I can't get them out. I can read them, but they're in spam land. So, I apologize if you don't see your comment! I am reading them, and they always lift my spirits.

Ok, it's time to find my beloved pillow...

Talk to you again real soon!

Oh, PRAISE! Today, officially marked the day that we are finished with all adoption paperwork this side of China to bring Maia home! Hallelujah!

Lots of thoughts and there's a lot more I could say, but for now, I'm going to go find my pillow and collapse on it.

Love to all! I'll be back soon with more pics!

Emily