Referral Time

Well, all of the papers for the dossier were safely off to the Guatemalan Consulate. I began to feel a little anxious, I wanted a referral. We had decided that we wanted to adopt a little girl. I looked at the precious little babies all of the time it seemed like. All of the little girls descriptions all stated you needed to be "paper ready" meaning have your dossier ready, submitted for approval and have your I-171H (approval from Immigration) in hand. The boys descriptions mostly said, "must have an approved home study done." I had started to reconsider adopting a boy, but I really wanted a girl. Don't get me wrong, boys are great, but my heart was saying girl. On Saturday, February 3rd, I was looking at all of the little babies like I always do and decided to look at the "Rainbow Kids" website. Sometimes they had babies listed for CCI before the CCI website did. That is when I first saw her. I read her "bio" and it didn't say, "must be paper ready". I couldn't believe it. So, I e-mailed Tammy, our case manager and asked about her. Her name was listed as Lourdes. She said that she would get in touch with Sue, the director of the Guatemalan program for CCI. Later Saturday night, Tammy e-mailed us back more pictures and said let me know if you are interested as soon as possible. I immediately e-mailed back YES!!!Tim and I went to bed, got up and I checked our e-mail again. There was e-mail from Tammy stating, "you have to let me know definitely ASAP in case she (Sue) gets another call. She (Sue) leaves for Taiwan at 5:00 tonight." I e-mailed back again, YES!!!!, Tim and I discussed it, prayed about it and slept on it. We got an e-mail back later from Tammy stating that she was still waiting to hear from Sue. We didn't hear anything else until the next morning...."She's yours, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!" Tammy explained to us later that Sue wants people to sleep on it, to be absolutely sure that it is the baby for them, so that is why she asked not once, but twice if we wanted her. We had a referral!!!!!We were on cloud 9.