Humble and Blessed

9/17/2010

We're starting to hear from our refrences that they've gotten their letter from our SW, finally. We gave her our list of references months ago. We don't know if everyone has received their letter, but a few have. One of our friends told us that they had a deadline of Sept 26th to return them. I wonder if they all had that timeline. That helps me get perspective on where the process is at.

We had to have several references, Steve & I both had to have a reference from our employer, each one of our kids had to have a seperate professional reference from someone in their schools, and we had to have 3 personal references not related. For our family that was 9 references, none of which were our family! We were thinking..do we even know 9 people, not related to us, who would be willing to give us a reference for adoption???? (then we started really looking around us).

This part of the process has me feeling very humble and very blessed; humble because these people are giving their opinion of us as parents, and our ability to offer a loving, safe home to another child. These opinions are based on many years of experiences with us, we are not perfect by any means. The people we asked to be our references know us...very well...the good, the bad, and the ugly. The fact that, even knowing what they know, they happily accepted our request to give us a reference to parent another child..makes me feel very humble. The fact that we are surrounded by so many amazing, supportive, Christian, people makes me feel blessed beyond words! I am so incredibly thankful for each and every person in our lives! We've all heard the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child", It's not just us who will be raising this little girl(s), it's our whole "village" of friends and family who will pray for, guide and influence, love, support and encourage her throughout her life. This makes me feel more confident in my ability to parent this little angel God is sending us, knowing that we are a part of such a wonderful "village".