So where are we now?

Well, not in Addis, that's for sure! But a few things have happened since I last wrote. The director of the orphanage we're working with has now acknowledged our interest in twins, and we have some kind of a game plan. Since we have been asking about this for AGES (emails, letters, all kinds of stalking, basically, which has all been met by a wall of silence) I can't tell you what a big relief this is. We have agreed that we will wait until mid-September, initially, and if no twins are available in that time then we will talk again about whether to wait longer, or move towards adopting a singleton. This is probably a good time to say that I really don't like using the word 'available' in this context, but can't think of a better one. This is probably also a good time to say that we really are very open to one on their own. How could we be other than thrilled by the news of a baby! I do want twins, if that can happen, but the reason I've been upset about this is not that I'm completely set on more than one baby. It's just that - I don't want our referral decision to be based on a miscommunication, and to have to wonder whether we should have tried harder to get answers, especially if we got to the orphanage and found cribs full of baby twins with nobody to take them home (cough cough unlikely!!)

Because of all this, I was talking to some friends (Hi Amy! Hi Sian!) yesterday and freaking out about the fact that when we adopt actually determines who we adopt. The baby that we might have been referred this week, if we hadn't asked to wait for twins, is almost certainly not the baby that we will end up adopting. And who knows what our family would have been like had we adopted this week's baby? Statistically speaking, he or she will probably end up in Belgium - I hope they have a very happy life there, eating moules and drinking bier (although obviously not yet, they are WAY too young for all that). They might have come home with us. That makes my head spin.

As a recovering control freak, and a Christian, it helps me enormously to know that God has his hand on this whole process. I was reading the beginning of Jeremiah today, where God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet and starts off by saying 'before I formed you in the womb, I knew you'. It reminded me that this is true for all of us (errr... not the bit afterwards, where he calls Jeremiah to a prophet and then Jeremiah gets stuck down a well, I just mean the bit about being known even before we were born). And I was reminded that God knows who our little one, or littles ones, are. Of course, right now, I'd rather not be in this holding pattern. I would rather have some idea of where we are in the queue, or even better, not be in the queue at all, but on a plane.

But. Either this delay will lead us to our singleton baby, rather than our Belgian might-have-been baby, or our twins, and they will be the baby or babies that were meant for us all along. One day we will see their little face/s and say, Hello Baby. No more hypotheticals. It's finally you!