The Wait Begins!

97 Days!

On the ride back from Lexington last week I sat with this FedEx package in my lap (as you can see it was unopened!). Mike and I had the discussion that once we opened the package our life would forever change. A combination of feelings went through my mind as I thought about the contents of the package. I was so excited but also scared. I wondered how we would feel seeing Emma for the first time. At that point I knew we had a daughter, her Chinese name Yu Xiang, and her birthdate, January 2, 2008 but that was it. We had received the call at 2:25pm and it was 7:55pm that night when we finally saw Emma's face for the first time. It was hard to wait on opening the envelope (what was a few hours after almost 4 years of waiting!) but we were so glad to share this moment with our family. We were right, when we finally opened the envelope and saw Emma's picture for the first time our lives changed! Not only did we fall even more in love with our daughter, the one that had been growing in our heart all of this time, we immediately got that feeling that every day we had to wait to go get her was going to be harder than the next. For years I have been reading the posts of those who got their referrals and them saying that this part of the wait was the worst and in one split moment I knew exactly how they felt. I couldn't imagine her being in the orphanage one minute longer. We have already missed 18 months of her life and we don't want to miss a minute more!
With that being said, the wait begins (the long wait!). On referral day (our unexpected early day) Phillip told us that our travel would be delayed due to Chinese holidays and trade fair but I thought that maybe he was overestimating our wait. Well, yesterday our wait was confirmed. I had drove to Lexington for our 3 hour travel meeting and we went over most everything for our trip, the most important to me being our estimated travel dates. That was when it was confirmed that we will not be traveling until Nov. 5th (97 days away). It seems that not only is there a holiday Oct 1-8 and then the trade fair from 15-31 but there is a holiday week in Sept also. How did China get so many holidays? How are we going to be able to wait 97 days to go get Emma?
Now I know we have waited this long and I know we have plenty of things to keep us busy between now and Nov. 5th but now we know that each day we wait Emma is sitting in an orphanage, getting older and we are missing all of these milestones in her life. This by far is going to be the hardest part of the wait. I will continue to pray everyday for our daughter to be well cared for and loved until we get there.
I feel like our early call came for a reason, Emma was ready! Since we thought our LID was 3/29 we thought that it would be Sept or Oct when we got our referral with travel in Nov or Dec. So even though we got our referral early it looks like travel will be the same. The thing I do know is if our LID was 3/29 than Yu Xiang would not be our daughter. We were approved for a daughter 6-18 months old and at the time we got Emma's referral she was 18 months old. With this being said if we had to wait a few months longer than Yu Xiang would not have been referred to us. I believe God had this in his plan long ago and knew that everything would work out to unite us with Emma in perfect timing. So while we are so sad to wait for Emma to be placed in our arms we know that it will all happen in God's time!