For us personally, the news of Ethiopia's proposed family size restrictions comes at a crucial time. As regular readers of this blog may know, we’ve been wondering/thinking/pondering/praying about whether to adopt a boy or a girl for some time now, but neither decision seemed to be the right one. We kept putting it on the backburner, but when we mailed our dossier to our agency a couple of weeks ago, we knew we’d have to make this important decision sooner than later.

On our way to our fingerprint appointment last week, I finally confessed to my husband that I’d been feeling our “child” should actually be two children. I worried about telling him this because we’d pretty much agreed that one would be it and that this would be the last one. To my amazement, it turned out that Curtis felt the same way! Within a matter of minutes we agreed that we’d like to adopt a 4-ish boy and a baby girl. We decided that we would fast and pray about it as a family over the weekend, and that if we still felt this was the right thing, we’d formally make the request at our agency.

Well, first we learned that our agency doesn’t allow the adoption of unrelated children under age 6, and we hadn’t realized this before (since we were just focusing on one child, we hadn’t bothered to ask about this). At first I despaired over this because it seemed a stretch to think a sibling group like this would happen along, but after a pep talk from my dear friend Erin over at Transracial Adoption, I realized that if we’d gotten this inspiration from Heavenly Father, there must be a reason. And we can wait. We’re truly not in any hurry.

After we fasted, we got an email from our agency indicating that they were fine with us waiting for a sibling group, as long as we realized it could be a while. I felt that was a definite answer to our prayers, and I went to bed feeling pretty optimistic about things!

Then, this morning, I received a call from our social worker. I’d emailed our homestudy agency to let them know that we were wanting to change to two children, so I figured she was calling me about the details. Imagine my surprise when she said she was only approving us for one child! In a split second, I felt all my plans disintegrating as I simultaneously tried to figure out how to reconcile my feelings and the decision of the social worker. I didn’t respond for a moment, and sensing my concern, she asked me to explain what had motivated us to request two children. I explained how we’d come to the decision, and that in part, we’d felt strongly that our daughter Sofie (almost 4) would do well with a sibling close in age. After I explained all our reasons, the social worker asked in a puzzled voice what ages we were talking about. (I assumed she knew this because I’d emailed the director all the specifics.) To make a long story short, she’d been under the impression we wanted to adopt two INFANTS! I assured her that this was not the case, and that it wasn’t something we were remotely interested in doing. She apologized for misunderstanding and said she had no problem approving us for two children if one was older. She promised to finish the new version of the homestudy and have it in the mail this afternoon. Whew!

After the short emotional rollercoaster I endured on the telephone, I was left feeling drained. I realized later what a blessing it was that I had said something to the social worker about our reasons for wanting two children, because otherwise, we never would have known there’d been a misunderstanding. Our family would have missed a wonderful opportunity because of a mistake in an email!

So this afternoon, when I learned about Ethiopia’s imminent new rules, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude for the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the ability we have to use prayer and fasting to help us know the Lord’s will for us. I’m so very sad for those these rules will affect, but so very thankful to my Father in Heaven for showing us – yet again – that He is aware of our family and our needs and that He can see the beginning from the end. Even looking back just a few months ago, we thought we might be jumping the gun a bit with starting another adoption so soon after getting our Haitian kids home, but I can see now that had we not begun when we did, our dreams of adopting from Ethiopia would have been dashed.

Many prayers of gratitude will be offered tonight!