On This Date 365 Days Ago...

...My family was driving home from the beach.  We had gone to Myrtle Beach and it was great.  We had an awesome time.  Mom had asked, as she had previous two years, if I thought we'd have a baby with us next year.  This time, unlike the previous two years, I said no.  I said that the process would most likely take longer than that, but hopefully by 2016 and almost certainly by 2017 we would have a baby at the beach.  

As we were driving, I was struck with the need to pray for our birth mother.  This wasn't unusual, after all I had been praying for her since I was sixteen and felt the first flutter of a calling to adopt.  I prayed and prayed, but the urgency of the need wasn't letting up.  Finally I told Josh that he needed to pray for our birth mother and we prayed together.  I think I even texted Mom in the other car and asked her to pray.  Finally the pressing feeling went away and I asked Josh what, if anything, he thought was going on in her life.  We wondered if maybe, possibly she had found out she was expecting.  How cool would that be?  We would have a June baby!  I was hoping.

Then we got home and found the official approval letter and I cried.  We were a waiting family.  I changed my cover photo to this.  We were so excited.  We were FINALLY getting close after years of seeming ever further away.  We just had no idea how incredibly close we were.

At 11 that night, Cordie made her sudden and slightly unexpected entrance.  It blows me away, truly even a year later, at how active and present God was in that entire situation.  I could not believe it when our adoption worker told us her birth date and I realized that I had been praying so hard for the birth mother That Day!  And yet, why should I have been surprised?  God's hand was all over our adoption start to finish.

There is no comparison between the screaming, colicky, barely a handful of a baby that we brought home almost a year ago and the happy, active, growing toddler we have now.  There were nights that felt so long in the moment that I thought I would never see the sun rise, but now I can't believe that the time has gone.  I was here for practically every second and yet I still feel like I missed it somehow.  I blinked and she was big!  It's amazing and breathtaking and heartbreaking and joyful and so many emotions that I can't help but cry.

Even as I experience the bittersweetness of her outgrowing clothes and toys, becoming super independent, and growing into her huge personality, I'm so excited about the next year!  She's going to add a lot of words to her vocabulary.  She'll learn to walk!  We're so close on that.  She's taken about half a dozen steps, but they're accidents, she doesn't even realize she's doing it.  She'll probably pick a thing she loves to sleep with like a doll or bear.  She may transition to a toddler bed.  She'll dance a lot, that girl loves to shake her thang!  Maybe learn work a puzzle or color.  Definitely master the iPhone.  It's going to be great.  I'm so glad I get to be here to see it.

Happy birthday my sweet pumpkin!  Mommy loves you more than you'll ever know.