All About Our Girl

My Dad commented yesterday on the miracle of loving someone that you've never even met before. That's us...Head over heels over our new daughter with only a few pictures and nowhere near enough (for this Mama!) information on her.

Lian Jia Shu was born on February 1, 2008 in Lianjiang City in the Guangdong province. One fact that saddens me so far, is that we've been given no information on where/when she was abandoned. Our prayer is that we would find this out when we receive her in 3 weeks. I desire to "piece together" as much of her beginnings as possible to give those details as a gift to her one day. We have almost literally mourned all of the "1sts" we have missed with our girl, but know we will be making "1st" memories with her from the start of our new life together.

When we received our referral in March, we received some information on her from when she was 8 months old...

She was 7.5 lbs when she was brought to the orphanage.
She was crawling at 7 months. She is developmentally & physically on track.
"Distinguishes between acquaintance and strangers"
"Knows name, turns when called"
"Fond of playing games"

And my personal favorites...
"Deep sleeper"
""Laughs aloud"
"Active & restless" :)
"She screams when she so excited." Yeah...she'll fit right in.

Our recent update only included weight, height & foot measurements. She's at 20 lbs and looks quite healthy to us.

We are anxious to get her home to begin the process of of meeting her medical needs. We have a clinic here that has agreed to meet with us when we return. This clinic encompasses not only the plastic surgeons who would perform her upcoming operations, but also ENTs, and speech therapists . We are already covering these people in prayer, whoever they are, as they will be the ones to treat Gracie.

We have prepared ourselves for the fact that Gracie will probably not be verbal due to the cleft palate. If you ever need a laugh, take a peek in our window one evening to see our family trying to learn baby signs along with our pitiful attempts to learn what we can of the Mandarin Chinese language. "A new normal" for sure!

We're also preparing our hearts for her bonding/grieving process. I can't even begin to imagine what will be going through her mind as she will be taken from the only home she's ever known and handed to total strangers who happen to look like no one she's ever seen before. We're asking God to prepare her little heart and mind for this life-changing transition.

We're counting down the days. Coming soon sweet girl!