The Call and The Journey

PART 1:
We got the call about three and a half weeks ago..... we were expecting "the call" to tell us that we had a court date to travel and meet our son.  We were told that there were 4 other families who all had their paperwork in and were "submitted to court" in Uganda about a week before us. Everyone else had gotten their court dates for 1st week, 2nd week,fourth week of June, and the last got a court date for the week of July 4th. So we were fully expecting to get a court date for the week after July 4th. A week went by and no news.... two weeks went by and no news. The third week came and I got a phone call as I was driving up to our home. Gabe, Mike, and Havannah were all out in the yard. This was the call we were waiting for.  We got our court date! But not for the 2nd or 3rd week of July..... for June 26th, which was only 2 and a half weeks away!!!!!! We were told that we would most likely get a court date with 4-6 weeks notice before travel.
I really didn't know how to feel..... excited, scared, and quite honestly sick to my stomach from a perfect mixture of fear and excitement....... fear for our safety, fear for the safety of our oldest child, who would be traveling with us, and fear for leaving our youngest child behind ...... sadness and fear that she might forget us while we were gone. And quite possibly the biggest fear of all.... the fear of the unknown..... the moment that we had been waiting for all these many months.... the moment that we could in no way plan or prepare for..... the moment we would meet our new son.
I have tried to tell myself to think of it much in the same way you would think of giving birth to a new child..... until the moment you meet them, they are also an "unknown".  You don't know what they will look like or what their personality will be like. You don't know how healthy they will be or if they will sleep through the night. So you also can not plan for giving birth to a certain degree. But I can now safely say that it is just different.

You can read the books and take the training. You can join adoption support groups and speak to other families that have adopted as well of other families that are in the process. You can google a million and one things and come up with checklists for what to pack (although we haven't used most of what we brought and have needed everything we didn't bring.) BUT there is no amount of planning that can prepare you for the moment that you will meet your child...... although even our birth children don't belong to us, they were only entrusted to us by God, but belong to Him..... our adopted children were first Gods, entrusted to and brought into this world by others.

The Journey......
In hindsight I am very thankful that we only got a little over 2 weeks notice because it was torture trying to plan the un-plannable in my head for 2 weeks... "role-playing" the moment of our first meeting- over and over a hundred different ways, only to know that it was just an exercise in keeping my mind occupied, because I knew that it would be nothing like any of those scenarios.
So after about 25 hours of travel and 2 more endless days of waiting once we got to Uganda, the real life version finally became a reality.
We got the phone call to say that our son was being brought to us, and they were about 15 minutes away. Mike, Gabe, and I had just made it back to the hotel after getting ourselves lost in downtown Kampala, which was a bit scary I will admit.
We got back just in time to run up to the room and get the puppy that we had bought for "k".  Gabe ran circles in the lobby, squeezing the life out of the stuffed animals neck, while jumping up and down like a maniac.  Mike and I were both worried that Gabe would scare K with his excitement and tried to calm him, to no avail.
Mike and I moved from some chairs in the lobby, to a bench closer to the door, and finally to standing out side...... (It really didn't matter where we waited because none of the locations would calm our nerves or change the outcome, but the movement made me feel better.) All the while, I was trying really hard not to cry because I wanted to look strong, like I had it all together. And I did not want to frighten K or his grandmother..... I knew that the culture was very different, they were probably scared of all of the things they had seen that were new to them, as they come from a small village about 7 hours away from Kampala, the capital, which is where we were. I also knew that they would not speak English and that it was possible they had never seen "Mazoongos" (their word for white people) and we knew nothing of what the grandmother had told K about what they were doing there....

So..... in talking to other adopting families and reading books, etc, you can never be prepared for the moment that you will meet your child, and I was fully prepared to accept the fact that we may not feel a connection to him right away. That would be perfectly normal. So I was actually worried about how long it would take to feel like he was mine........

When we were waiting outside for them, we knew it was him because we could see his Scooby Do shirt. This was the same shirt that he was wearing in the pictures from the referral that we had gotten several months back.... we saw them from across the parking lot. It took everything in me not to burst into tears and I felt like I needed super human strength not to take off running across the parking lot as they got closer and closer, as I didn't want to scare him.. When they finally got to us, I got down to my knees, and put my hands out, thinking that just maybe he would give me his hand, and even though I knew he did not speak English, I said the only thing that came to me which was "Hi, how are you?"

What came next was totally unexpected..... he came close and put his arms around me and said , "I'm fine".

It was kind of like the "Jerry McGuire" movie....... "He had me at hello".

It seemed like we held each other for 2 or 3 minutes..... STILL I do not know who he thinks I am at this moment.....

I just turned into a well of tears and that was it. I loved him at that moment, and in that moment I knew that I had always loved him.

God has been preparing this meeting and this journey since before I was in my mothers womb. I am so thankful for the plans He has for us and our future as a family.