In my last post I said to stay tuned to why we are specifically adopting Davinsly… So, settle in…here’s how the (short version of the) story goes: on July 29th, Doreen pulled me aside before church and said, “we are adopting Stanley!” My mouth about fell to the floor, tears filled my eyes and my heart started pounding.  I was ‘shock and awed’. She sat in between Sara (see my connections post if you are wondering who Sara is) and I that morning. None of us could stop smiling the whole service.  Afterwards, I asked Sara (knowing that most if not all of the boys now were spoken for by adoptive families) how many boys were left needing families…she said, “One. Davinsly.” Right then, I blurted out, “well, maybe we’ll just have to adopt him!”  Then, I left church and headed to work at the golf course…asking myself and the Lord, “what was I saying?! Did I really mean that?? That was crazy! I don’t do stuff like that!”  Back and forth my mind went… I called Scott and said, “…just so you know, I kind of blurted out to Sara that maybe we should adopt the last little boy at the orphanage…I can’t stand the thought of him being there by himself and all his friends having left to their American families.”
Scott (who handles my randomness pretty well most of the time) basically asked me what other details I knew about him and if we knew what his status was and to find out.  So, the next few days were spent in jumbled thoughts, prayers and discussions with God, Scott and Sara as she investigated some details.  She has a friend who supported Davinsly last year and we wondered if she and her husband had thought about adopting him.  We just wanted somebody to! And, I told God that if he was just using us to prompt them to make a decision to adopt him, that was okay, too.  About a week later, Sara found out that her friends were not going to start the process and they gave us their blessing to go ahead if we were feeling led to do it.
Scott and I decided to ask our families and close friends to be in prayer with us over the next 3 weeks as we wanted to not make a hasty decision.  I felt strongly that I wanted Cali and Will to both be on board from the start if we were going to proceed…and they were (I was kinda surprised at this!).  Those days we all spent talking together and praying together were very sweet.  We also spent time talking with Sara’s sister and brother in law (Lori and Scott) who have brought their two sons home from the same orphanage.  My Scott valued his ‘dad to dad’ chat with Lori’s Scott on the morning of the Kozefo 5K. Also, it was really cool to see the kids being watchful for any sign that God might be giving us to go ahead and keep walking down the path towards adopting Davinsly.  (They saw lots of signs!) At one point, sweet Willy said, ‘Mom, when do you think God is going to tell us to adopt him or not?! We’ve never prayed for anything this big before!”

We also needed to hear from the orphanage director that he was officially available and that no other family somewhere had started the adoption process for him.  We got that word while we were at family camp in late August (see the kiddo’s thoughts post for more on that).
We felt that we were heading down the path of saying yes to doing this, but we wanted to continue to talk with others and we have always said that we will trust God in the entire journey not just the end result.  I keep telling the Lord that He can feel free to shut this door at any time if it is not His will that Davinsly be a part of our family!  So, a couple days after we returned home from Trout Lake we submitted our applications to the Montana and Edina agencies to start the process…and we have just kept walking down the road as God keeps the doors open ‘for such a time as this’…

a quick update on the process: our dossier and home study are in the hands of A New Arrival (in Montana), and I’m not sure what those hands are doing with those things now that they are there… our I600-A is on its way to the USCIS and we should hear soon that they received it and then shortly after that we should get an appointment date to get FBI fingerprints done… there’s no shortage of people checking up on us, I’ll tell you that.

AND, THE MOST EXCITING NEWS OF TODAY:  Everest (an American who has been staying at the orphanage) is going to tell Davinsly and Stanley about us and the Haroldsons this week! He is leaving Haiti on Thursday and will be returning in a few months, so he is going to tell them before he leaves! That makes it feel very real and gives me the chills and makes us all very happy!