Welcome Home Xander

One of my new adoptive cyberfriends, who is a wonderful mom as well as an excellent writer, happened to adopt her son from the same orphanage where our sweet little Ava resides temporarily. My cyberfriend is Shelley, and I hope she doesn't mind me sharing her blog containing a beautiful photo slideshow of Xander's life and recent grafting into the Bedford family. I have watched this four times now, and of course I've cried every time, partly because I am so happy for their family and for Xander, and (I have to be honest here), partly because I just cannot wait until it is us and Ava experiencing it!

There are good things and bad things, I suppose, about being able to have photos of your someday-to-be-adopted child. I get to see her so many times a day, and visualize rocking her, holding her. Yet I have to experience the agony every day of seeing her cute little button nose, her little hands closed so tightly in a fist, her beautiful blue eyes, and my favorite part of her I admit is her soft little uni-brow....knowing that nobody is rocking her to sleep, stroking that cute little unibrow, admiring her beautiful eyes, and button nose, or loaning her a finger to grip. I just feel like I can't get there fast enough, and yet the Lord reminds me that His timing is perfect. John wrote the sweetest letter to Ava, that maybe she will be able to read someday. If not we will read it to her. We wish we could have had 4 years that seem wasted in a lonely crib, but we know He will let us make up for those years somehow.

So here is the link to Xander's welcome home video. I hope you enjoy it as I have. (P.S. The little boy in the red Reebok suit in the crib with Xander, is not a little boy at all. That is our sweet Ava, another reason why I have cried watching this. Xander is not there to stroke her little face and fingers anymore. I wonder if she worries about what happened to her little friend!)