That's a bummer

We have planned on adopting two children at the same time. We have known about our son for almost 2 months, and still no referral for a little girl has come in. This morning we learned that if they do not process through court and the system at the same time then we would have to pay the full price for our second referrral.

We were not aware of that fact. We don't have the money currently for a second set of full price fees.

It is an interesting scenario for us. Originally, we intended to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia. We had considered twins, but decided against it. Then we traveled to Uganda where we fell in love with a set of twins. The countries legal guardianship shut down, and we ultimately went with another country. Because of our experience with the twins, we decided that wherever we ended up choosing we would do two at a time. We always knew we wanted to do two, we just didn't always consider the idea of two at a time.

Fast forward several months, when we signed up with our new agency we requested two children. One boy and One girl. The referral for our son came in and we were so ecstatic. We just assumed that a girl would follow shortly. Only she hasn't.

Now we are considering several different options. Perhaps we are not meant to adopt a little girl. This would be full circle for me since I was the one who originally wanted to adopt just a daughter in the beginning. Or perhaps we are meant to adopt a girl older that what we had planned. We requested two children under the age of 12 months at the time of referral. Our agency has had several little girls over our age range that have been referred since we received our son.

The tricky part in all of this, aside from discerning what we are supposed to do, is the fact that the last couple of families that have come out of court through our agency came out when the agency didn't even know they had gone in! It is sort of this mad rush against time and the possibility that we may not know when we go to court. How can we add a child to a court date if we may not know when that is?

I do feel peaceful about it though, surprisingly. God is in control and we will end up with the children we are meant to have. Chris is a little more apprehensive. He leans more to the thought that we are ecstatic about our son, and all of our energy is going into him, but once he is home, are we going to mourn the fact that we didn't try for a girl?

I don't have the answer to that question.

We would appreciate your prayers as we move through the next week or two. Truly, we have no idea how much time we may have to get a referral for a little girl. Court is estimated at 1-2 months. We are on approximately week 3 1/2.

Ah, this crazy thing called International adoption!