God blew us away today!

By reading my post yesterday, you probably realized how much of a disappointing week it's been. Not so much because we still haven't gotten LOA, although that would've been nice. There's been more disappointment with our whole update thing. We ordered the orphanage phone call 2 weeks ago, were supposed to get it within 10 days, and still haven't. Mom and I had lost all hope of receiving the desperately wanted news. You might wonder why this is so important to us. Yes, we REALLY want pictures (!!!) and info, but most importantly we just want to know where our sweet girl is...

You seeeee... When Kate was brought to her CWI, she was 2 months old and very weak. According to her info, she was sent to a children's village where she received the nurture she needed. It was also said that with the proper nurture and care, her SN (an angioma) lightened. So, there is a very strong possibility that she has already had some treatment to fix that. Anyway, we still were very unsure of where she was, how she was doing, and so on.

Today, Mom decided that she would email and just make sure that everything had gone through. Mainly just so if we weren't going to get an update, we wouldn't have our hopes up. Within an hour, she was emailed back, followed by a call, with lots of information. She said they will make sure that the call went through, check if anything was sent and it just hasn't been sent to us yet, etc. and email us tomorrow letting us know. So while we don't know anything about Kate quite yet, we do know some good stuff about her orphanage!

So anyway, the good news... First of all, Kelly said that Kate's orphanage is very good with outsiders, great to work with, and she is confident that they will give us an update. What we DIDN'T know about Kate's orphanage is that Love Without Boundaries is VERY involved there! (YAY! We are so blessed! Half the Sky was in AnnaClaire's and LWB is in Kate's!) In her orphanage alone, LWB provides the nutritional care for many of babies and have done surgeries for some of them! In Kate's report, it is said that she received nutritional care so we are thinking that she is in the LWB nutritional program!!

In every single picture they have of the babies getting the bottles (full of great formulas that help their nutrition), a nanny is HOLDING and FEEDING the child! This was GREAT news as far too many (most) orphanages leave the bottles in the cribs with the babies for them to drink themselves. This was VERY encouraging news.

Kate's other need is that she has nutritional anemia. Kelly (who is a LWB volunteer!!) ASSURED us that Kate is getting the proper nutrition to take care of that, too!

Oh AND, once we have Kate home, we can request her progress reports and have info and pictures from her first year and a half of life!!! (We were able to do this with AnnaClaire and Half the Sky, too! Actually we just recently filled out the form for that so we haven't gotten them yet, but will soon!)

This was just what we needed today... a little pick-me-up. God heard our cries and gave us info that we might never have known if we had gotten our update in the usual 7-10 days!! Praise God!!

I don't think you realize how much you miss your child until you actually have pictures. Once you have them, that is your child (in my case, sister.) You don't know them, have never met them, and you might just have 3 pictures and 1 page of medical info... but that doesn't make him/her any less yours. To hardly know anything about our sweet girl is really hard. I am so thankful that the Lord sent this info to us today. We really needed that. Now if we could just get that update on Miss Ling Ling! :)

And... I can't finish this post without giving a high recommendation to Angela and Kelly at Ladybugs *N* Love. They are great to work with (as I'm sure you can tell from this post!) and very sweet, too!

AnnaClaire is holding the 2 "bootisul pitures" that she drew today. The pink one is a picture of Kate and the orange one is a self portrait of Miss AnnaClaire!