Once we had seen this precious face, we asked for her file. A child's file contains all the medical history the orphanage has on her along with a bit about her development and personality. One thing that was mentioned several times about Ivy-Ann is that she loves to sing and can easily learn songs. Now, if you know anything about my other girls, you know that singing is a big part of our daily lives. In fact, Brian often says that our family lives in the midst of a musical.
Another thing we learned about Ivy-Ann is that she has an eye condition called nystagmus. This causes her eyes to constantly shift from side-to-side. There is no cure for it, but glasses are typically very helpful. We will try to help her find the right tilt of head that will allow her to better focus. As she gets older, we will also try contacts, as these can often highly minimize the effects of the nystagmus. We don't know the severity of her nystagmus, but eye conditions are not foreign to our family. I have dealt with various eye issues for the past twenty years. Ashlyn had a very serious eye condition for five years (that cleared up two years ago!). Ivy-Ann's nystagmus felt very familiar to us.
We also noticed that Ivy-Ann seems happy and loved. I'm a big researcher, and after some poking around, I found eighteen pictures of her and four videos. There are orphans in various orphanages that basically never get physically touched. This breaks my heart, and I just cannot understand it. But in most of the pictures of Ivy-Ann, she is being held or caressed somehow by one of the nannies. This spoke volumes to us. We have been taught that this will help her bond more easily with us.
She is also very curious. In multiple pictures she is peering into whatever is happening trying to figure it out. Since she can't see well, she has to hold items quite close to her eyes so she can focus on them. In one of the videos and in some of the pictures, you can tell that she spends time studying things in order to figure out the details of them.
These were some of the things that caused us to fall in love with this little girl immediately. After reading her file, we were ready to see if we could be matched with her. This means we would send a letter of intent for her to the CCCWA (China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption), and they would pre-approve us to be her family. The problem was that Ivy-Ann's file was marked as "special needs" and not "special focus." Because of where we were in the process, we could only be matched with a "special focus" child. Our agency even requested that China change her file so we could be matched. They said no. Logan, our adoption specialist, said she would make a note by Ivy-Ann's file that we were interested in her, and she would let us know if another family got matched with her.
All we could do at that point was work on getting our dossier (our home study, immigrations' approval, police clearances, basically lots of paperwork) to China so the CCCWA could log us into their system. It was only when we were logged-in that we could be matched with a "special needs" child. We hoped and prayed that Ivy-Ann would still be available once we were logged in, but our excitement for her also proved to us that we were ready to adopt.
We moved as quickly as we could through getting fingerprints and doing all we needed to do to complete our dossier. At the end of February, Logan called to see if we were still interested in Ivy-Ann. She wanted to know what our interest-level was and where we were with our paperwork. We were going to get fingerprinted the next day, which was the last thing we needed for our dossier. And yes! we were still very interested.
Logan called the next day to ask if we would consider sending Ivy-Ann a little gift. She said this was not normal, and it would guarantee us nothing. Gift-giving is very important in the Chinese culture, and our coordinator in China felt this would be good for the CCCWA and the interested families to see. We decided to go ahead and send her a little blanket and a small stuffed animal. We knew that it may be nothing more than showing a sweet, little girl that someone cared for her.
After that, we didn't hear anything until Tuesday, April 16. Our paperwork had been logged into China a week before, and with that we had sent a letter to the CCCWA expressing our intentions and desire to adopt this little girl. On April 16, we received a phone call from Logan. She told us that the CCCWA had pre-approved us to be Ivy-Ann's family.
It had been almost four months since we had first seen that beautiful face. Now we were told she would be ours. And so began the growing of this little girl in my heart. During those four months of not knowing whether or not she would belong to us, I had tried to protect myself from becoming attached to her. But once I heard those words from Logan, it was almost as if an emotional pregnancy began. God has created me to love and take care of this little girl, and He is growing her inside of me in such a similar way as He did my other girls. It is a gift, and I am so humbled and honored to be chosen to be Ivy-Ann's mama.
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