All about our baby girl!

Song LiQin ~ Song is her last name and is pronounced as it is spelled... Song

Her name, LiQin is pronounced LeeCheen

We will call her  Ivy Joy

She is in a fabulous orphanage,

We have been blessed with many photos and even video from people who have visited there recently

This is Little Miss Ivy when she was 4 months old! She was abandoned about 1 month before this photo was taken. You can see she was very well fed!

She can even make a sweater vest look cute!

A nurse involved in a program that trains the nannies at this orphanage blessed us with these very early photos of our little chunk! We are so grateful for both her ministry and her gift of these photos!

And just these past few weeks, 2 wonderful families took these photos of Ivy while they were visiting the orphanage. These are photos are what Ivy looks like today.

Ivy's Health

You can see that our little one has lost her chub....

Ivy has a serious heart defect and her little body is working very hard as she waits to come home and have a life saving surgery that should have happened in her first week of life. Her orphanage has tried 2 times to get it done in China however they have been told that due to the high mortality rate for this particular surgery, they will not perform it in China~ever.

I will be honest with you

Because we all learn from each other not by making everything look rosy and wonderful, but by our honesty.

I was not quite ready to start our second adoption. I planned on Lexi being at least 3 when we began paper chasing.

I never ever wanted to be matched with a child before we were logged in with China, never wanted a child to have to wait longer because of me.

I wanted to adopt a preschool aged child, maybe even a boy!

I did not want to do diapers or bottles or cribs.

Yep, I wanted easy street :)

But..... God had other plans

Because God is so much smarter than me and he knows me so much better than I know myself!

And this little girl was waiting. Even though she is young, she was waiting a long time.

Many people fell in love with her gorgeous eyes and cherub face.

But when it came time to make  the big decision, they were afraid of her tiny broken heart, and she was left without a family once again.

I was advocating for this LiQin and learned that she was in great need of surgery. I have families emailing me regularly asking me to help them find a child that matches their SN list. I was emailing with a few families, she was too young for one of them and the other was not approved for a heart baby, nor interested in one.

She was on my mind, in my heart, I knew God was telling me she already had a family. At the moment I was unaware that is was us.

I prayed for her daily, I visited her photo, memorized her little face, asked God to continue the miracle and keep her healthy until her family came.

Then after an email to the agency that had her file, and learning some new info about her and the care she is in. After asking God to tell me straight up what to do and make it loud and clear, after a meeting with the kids and much support from all 5 of my darling angels, after one last review of the info from the cardiologist who reviewed her file, after some texting with my precious sister who was truly a ROCK for me that morning, after a final conversation with my Darling Husband who was 100% on board with this from the first time he laid eyes on Ivy Joy, we locked her file and sent LOI.  

And we knew from that moment on that this was right.

That she was ours.

That God would not give us more than we could handle and that we could handle more than we gave ourselves credit for.

And suddenly bottles and diapers and cribs sounded just fine.

We would be blessed with more than we deserve once again.

And Ivy will have the family she has been waiting so long for.

And both Ivy and Lexi will have a same age sister to go through life with.