six months

Six months!

In our arms, face to face.  Emma with her family.

A mere half year ago, we waited nervously in a hotel conference room ten thousand miles from home.  We watched families holding their newly met children, and awaited our YuXiao.  Her train was late.

I still remember the oddest mixture of emotions.  It was pure joy and love all jumbled up with worry, fear, wondering.  Unease and total peace co-mingled.

The wait felt unending.  I remember I kept glancing at Cooper and Jeb wondering what in the world it felt like to sit waiting for a new sister, watching parents anxious and eager, halfway around the world as a teenager?  And I prayed it would change their lives for God's glory.

Suddenly there she was.

First impressions:
She was so much taller than I expected.  And busy.  She was looking all over the room at the various toys, people, etc.  She walked right over to meet us, eyes sparkling.  A smile.  Friendly and accepting even in what she now tells us was fear.  Beautiful.  Brave.  Ours.

I recall the same anxiety I felt when we met Anna.  It was about enfolding a child into our family smack dab in the middle of a foreign country where every meal was in a restaurant, each stroll out in public where we didn't know where we were.  Totally out of my comfort zone.  I worried about what we would do if Emma didn't want to stay with us.  What would it look like if she suddenly started to run away from us?  Ugh, that was what I was afraid of.  Truly.  How would we do this, the knitting together of our family, in such strange and uncomfortable {for me} circumstances.

And as He does, God walked it out with us.  And it was all okay.  It was better than okay, actually.  It was good.

 The boys who were waiting for their sister?

 They witnessed a miracle before their very eyes.

And fell in love right alongside us.  Having Cooper and Jeb with us was a beautiful piece of God's provision for our family.  A total and complete blessing to Jim and me, and to their new littlest sister, Emma Kate YuXiao.

We did eat dinner in our room that night, giving Emma time to focus on us and us on her.  We wanted to keep our world as small as possible for that evening.  Akin to a hospital birthing room.  With a five and a half year old.  I have no remembrance of what we ate.  Wow!  I'm just realizing that now.

She didn't sleep a wink that night.  Not.one.  I played quietly with her in our bed all snuggled in and surrounded by every single item in both of her backpacks, including the backpacks themselves, until about three or four in the morning.  I was sooo tired, I woke Jim up and he played until about six while I slept.  It wasn't a scary night, and it wasn't stressful, but it was long.  I can only imagine what it was like for Emma.

It was the first night she slept in a bed with a soft mattress.  With a pillow.  And more than one blanket.
It was also the first night she met us.  And then we got in bed together to do something as private and intimate as sleeping.

And we were family.  Still growing to know each other.  And yet also fully family.

This sounds funny, but I keep thinking of it as our "arranged family".  God ordained, and purposed to knit together in such circumstances.  Akin to an arranged marriage, just arranged in the heavenlies, by our Heavenly Father.  And not one bit of a a surprise to Him.  He had us in a holy birthing room.  And He made it good.

When I asked Emma if she remembered meeting us for the first time, she said that she had been waiting for us and she wasn't scared about if we would be nice.  She knew we would be nice.  When asked how she knew that she simply looked at me askance and shared that mommy and daddy carried her and smiled at her with our mouth and our eyes.  She wanted to come home.

Wow.

It is hard to comprehend how it must have all felt for her.  And I wonder if over time we will hear again and again her story of that day.

And the incredible love that blossomed.

We will tell her our story of that day again and again.  The most beautiful of days.  A beautiful time.

The one thing we can know will always remain true, constant is God's goodness and His ordination of each for the other.  God never walks away from His promises.  And in Emma, He gave us a good and perfect gift.

I hope that for her, we are the same.

In the next days, I want to write about all that has transpired in the months she has come home.  Chronicle a bit the things she has learned {oh, boy is the list long!}, the changes her little body has experienced, and the things she has begun to share with us about China.

For months after Emma arrived she didn't or wouldn't talk much at all about China.  Jim and I began to pray that God would give her confidence to open that door when she was ready.  And in the form of some memories from her friend, Chloe, who was also adopted be a dear and lovely family, Emma's floodgates suddenly opened.

I can't wait to write more about it.

But for today, I end with the sentence she spoke this morning.

"Momma.  Emma forever home".

Thanks be to God.  What good things He has done.