November 28th: The Email from Fana

November 28th was a Wednesday. It was the week after Thanksgiving. Our homestudy was rolling along in process. All of the stuff that you send out for was sent, and the appointments needed had already been made. Fingerprints and all of that had commenced.

So it was a wednesday night, I think Ted was on the 10-8p shift. I was still pretty sick with a nasty head cold, as was the majority of the rest of the worship team, so Cliff had cancelled rehearsal for that night. The boys were in the basement playing and I was cooking/cleaning/doing whatever I do while getting ready for kids dinner.

An email came through from the special needs coordinator for Friends of Fana MN with some information on a little boy.. and from my standpoint things looked good, but I definitely needed Ted's thoughts. I had to wait for him to get off of work!!!

The pictures looked a little something like this...



Preciousness is he not???!!

He called me right away when he got out. He came home. He read the medical report... and of all things.. WHILE MAKING A SANDWICH.. as if we were discussing whether or not I should get the oil changed tomorrow.. he says "Write the letter." So.. I took a deep breath and verified "Just to be clear, you are saying that you want this little boy, and to write the letter." Ted: "Yep, write the letter. The situation isn't going to get any better than that!" So then I made peace with the fact that I was willing asking for 3 little boys under the age of 5. On my own free will.

So I did. I sat down Thursday morning and wrote a 3 page letter stating why we are the best family for Sam. I had to run over to Ted's work for him to sign it, and then we scanned it and emailed it off to Crossroads in MN to send to FANA on our behalf.

Then we waited, not sure if we would be selected for him or not... and kept working on our papers. It was the holidays, and we chose not to tell our family in the event that another family was selected. We thought that news would come around mid December before everything closed down for the holidays. It is Colombia, the world stops in December for the holidays and I should have known that. Christmas came and went, and we looked forward to January when the committee would start meeting again. All the way, I was still working on the homestudy and finalizing it, as well as sending out for everything in the dossier I was in control of.

Finally, January 8th, we got an email that we were approved to continue to pursue Janer Rocha Torres.. and we have been ever since! We were finally able to share with our families 6 weeks later :-)