Still Smiling

Why is this girl smiling?  What can she possibly have to smile about?  She lives in a place called Smokey Mountain.  It is a garbage dump in Manila.  Many people actually live there.  I wouldn’t really call it living though.  I think surviving would be a better word to use.  The children spend all day rummaging through the garbage finding trinkets or anything they might possibly be able to sell just so they have food to eat.  I have seen many pictures of street kids in the Philippines, but this one really got my attention.  How can she possibly be happy when to everyone else looking at her life it would seem so grim.  

That is what is so great about children.  They take each moment as it comes.  They don’t worry about the future or get depressed about how their life should be, the things they should have.  This girl probably isn’t even aware that she is living in such horrible conditions.  To her, it is her life.  It is all she knows and probably ever has known.  We can learn a lot from this little girl.  We should take pleasure in all the small moments in life.  We should not spend so much time worrying and wondering about things we might be missing out on or the things we don’t have.  We should not worry so much about what the future will bring, but should instead just take each day as it comes and make the most of it.  If this little girl who has spent her entire life, so far, living in a garbage dump can smile and find joy in life, then all of us can.  Life is what we make of it.  Either your glass is half empty or it is half full.  I hope I can live most of my life with my glass half full and not worry so much about the other things.

I wanted to post this today, because we received some more frustrating news about our adoption today.  I got an email from someone at our placement agency to tell us that they are missing our medicals.  I sent those to them 3 months ago.  I think the only reason they are asking for them now is that I just sent them an email asking if our dossier has been sent to the Philippines yet.  We sent this same person our home study a month ago to review and then give to the Philippine Program Assistant to attach to our dossier before it can be sent off.  Anyway I was going to write a long post all about this in order to vent away all my anger and frustrations, but then I remembered this photo and it actually calmed me down a lot.  It helped me to look at all of this from a different angle.  I could get really angry and upset and start blaming our agency for doing such a horrible job or I can trust that this is all for a reason and our dossier is not meant to be sent off yet.  Maybe it is the Lord who is causing all of these random things to happen so everything is delayed more and more.  Maybe our child is not ready yet or we are not ready for our child yet.  I know I have said all of this before, but how easy it is to forget when you think things are finally going to go smoothly just to hit another bump.  Oh well, what’s one more bump.  We’ve made it over all the other ones, I’m sure we’ll make it over this one too.  I know we are in the Lord’s hands, so I will just keep on smiling despite everything else.

USCIS Fingerprinting

Yesterday was our scheduled day to go in for our fingerprinting with the USCIS. Our appointments were scheduled for 11am, so we dropped the girls at my mom’s at 10am in order to give us plenty of time to get there.  We had to go all the way to south seattle to the Home Land Security Offices where the USCIS was located.  I don’t know why, but nothing ever goes smoothly for us when it comes to this adoption stuff and yesterday was no different.  We realized, after we dropped the girls off, that Jason had grabbed the wrong paper and the one we needed was still at home.  They required us to bring our fingerprint appointment forms with us and Jason had accidently grabbed another form they had sent us instead.  We had to drive all the way home, which was 15 minutes away.  Once we left our house we only had 40 minutes to drive 40 miles in Seattle traffic.  Needless to say we were both a little stressed.  We had no idea what would happen if we were late.  They stressed on the form we received in the mail that if we failed to make it to our appointment that we would not be receiving another one.  This was the final important step in our adoption paperwork and if it didn’t get done, we would not be able to adopt.  I think I prayed all the way there that we would make it on time or at least close to on time.

Somehow we managed to arrive just 5 minutes late.  We were definitely lucky or I guess we were blessed to not run into any traffic the whole way there.  Once we got there we had to go through security and then got a number, filled out our forms and our numbers were called almost immediately after our forms were done.  We were in and out in less than a half hour.  The lady doing my fingerprints mentioned that not as many people are doing adoptions this year as there were last year.  She said that if we had come there last year, we would have had to wait hours to get our fingerprints done.  I guess with all the new restrictions and requirements it is getting harder and harder to adopt internationally, so fewer people are doing it.  I can definitely understand why.  If we had known ahead of time how hard all of this was going to be, I’m not sure we would have gone through with it.  Although, when you know it is what you are suppose to be doing, nothing is too difficult.  It feels so good right now to know that everything is finished and now all we have to do is wait.  I’m sure something else will come up while we wait for our approval, but at least we know that right now it is all out of our hands.