Originally written 5/4/08
This year held a lot of emotions for us. We were so excited to be making progress with all the paperwork and nearing the waiting phase. I was still very worried about paying for this adoption. There are not even words to describe our anxiousness every time our agency got a new batch of referrals. And trying to cope with the news that Kurt's mom (who was living with us) was just diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and was given less than a year to live.
The first part of the year we just concentrated on getting the dossier submitted to China. Then we knew it was just a matter of time before we would get a referral. Of course we prayed that it would come soon.
Kurt's mom, Sam, was still doing okay with her diagnosis and started a round of Chemo treatments. She was only able to do two of these before her white count was depleted and they could not continue. About springtime she decided to have hospice come in and help her daily. Even though her spirits were high she just did not have the energy to do much.
Over the summer we had lots of company come. Kurt's brother and his family and his sister and her family. It was a great joy to Sam to have her children close to her during this time. As July neared we prepared for another deployment for Kurt and his family went back to South Dakota.
The first week of August was not a good week for Sam.
After her wonderful visit with her children and grandchildren her health deteriorated greatly. August 7th we moved her to a hospice care facility. Kurt was called back from his deployment and his brother and sister returned. Sam went home to be with our Lord and Savior on August 21, 2006. This was a very emotional time for us. The day Sam passed away AWAA got a new batch of referrals.
We had mixed emotions about this batch of referrals. . . of course we wanted our little girl home with us as soon as possible and the referral was the next step to making that happen, however with Sam just passing away we felt like our family needed that time to grieve before the next major transition. We did not receive a referral this time and that was okay because it just wasn't the right time.
Sometime during this year I finally wore Kurt down and we decided on a name for our new daughter. Craig had already picked out a name--Faleequa--need I say more. We just could not imagine naming our child Faleequa. We still joke with Craig that he can name his first daughter Faleequa.
Kurt resisted picking out a name for her because he said that he wanted to wait until we saw her. I told him that was just silly. We didn't wait until we saw our other children to name them. So after many months of not having a name for our precious one we decided to find the right name. We started out with me writing down all the names I that we liked and going from there. We knew that the middle name would be either Claire or Lynn. All of our children are named after someone in our family. Claire would be after my grandfather and Lynn is my middle name. We had about 25 names on my list. Each night the whole family would sit down and choose one name that we really did not like. We would then put those 5 names in a bowl and draw out two to eliminate. After many nights of this we got the list down to two names. . . Amy and Laura. So the different combinations would have been Laura Lynn, Laura Claire, Amy Claire or Amy Lynn. I left the final decision up to Kurt. After a few minutes of reading over the possibilities he came back and said that he liked Amy Lynn but wanted it to be one name. So we now had our Amilynn. Her middle name would be her Chinese name.
Financially we were starting to get a little more worried. Remember those grants we heard about and researched. Well we applied for about 10-12 of them. Each grant had an application fee of anywhere from $10-$50 so there was an additional expense. We got 0 grants. That's right, I said 0. Even though our God is an awesome and amazing God and had so far provided us with what we needed when we needed it, we decided we needed to do a little something extra to help our cause. We decided to do a Home Interior Candle Fundraiser. I love candles!!!
We set our goal at $3000.00 which was the amount of the orphanage rearing fee. Kurt was absolutely amazing with this fundraiser. He got enough orders from work to fill up at least three order form sheets. We had about 10 amazing people who helped by taking the order sheets with them to get orders for us. And we worked and prayed. Again God provided--we made $3050.00 from our fundraiser!! In addition to our fundraiser, different members of our church donated a total of about $1000.00. What a blessing they are to support us not only through prayer but in this way too.
Christmas time in 2006 was another tough time for us. As we were getting ready to celebrate the birth of Jesus, our agency got another batch of referrals. I had gotten my hopes up so high that we would get a referral for Christmas. What an amazing Christmas gift that would be. For those of you not familiar with what a referral is, it is the file for a specific child. We had so many people praying with us and excited for us. It was very difficult for me to tell them all that it wasn't meant to be. I was very emotional each time I had to tell another friend that it wasn't our time.
Even though we had many challenges during the year of 2006, we knew that we had people supporting us. Our amazing local adoption support group, our amazing church family and of course our wonderful extended family. We continued to meet with our support group for encouragement. After all, who would know better what we were going through but them?
As 2006 came to a close we were still awaiting our referral, planning on how we would pay for the rest of the adoption, joining our support group in encouraging others and praying that our little girl would be home with us soon.
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