Hi! From us both this time...
Hello everyone! And the term "everyone" certainly has grown over the last 8 months, 2 weeks and 1 day! (But who's counting?! :-)
We just want to say that our hearts are overjoyed with the amount of people that have been following this journey with us, offering prayer, words of encouragement and of course lots of excitement as well.
As I've mentioned before we have been blessed with a TREMENDOUS amount of love and support from our friends, family and those we just met that have invested their hearts and faith into this process we are going through. It's truly a beautiful thing and we are so grateful to have each and every supporter with us for this incredible journey. We have a little ways to go yet, so we do hope you continue to pray for us until we are safely at home from Africa.
With that being said, we do have something very important to share with you all. Since we are expecting a referral call any day now, we think it's important to let you all know what we are willing to discuss about our son when that day comes.
Don't worry, we plan to shout it from the rooftops when we have gotten the referral and have the photo and information about our son. We are SO THRILLED for this day and to show you all the baby we all loved so much before we even knew him.
However, we think it's important for you all to know that there will be information we are not sharing with anyone. We want to make you all aware of this ahead of time because if we were on the other side of this situation, we would want to know. So, here it goes:
We are not sharing our child's story with anyone except for our son.
We have decided that there is so much this little one will have taken away from him, his culture, a birth mother, the orphanage, his nanny, everything. The least we can do as his parents is let him decide if he would like to share that information with others.
So what does that mean for you? Basically it just means that we are respectfully asking everyone NOT to ask or pry for information regarding what happened to our child or if we will meet his birth mother, etc. When he is old enough to understand what the situation is, he will be able to make the choice if he wants to tell what happened to him.
We thought it was important to tell you all this now because we will likely find out his story on referral day, which hopefully is within the next few weeks!
Please know we are so thankful to have other adoptive families that have shared their insight with us on this topic. Also, please understand that we are not saying that adoptive families who share these stories are doing the wrong thing, they are just doing what is right for their family and we have nothing but respect for that. This is just a decision we have discussed and feel passionately about and we thank you very much for understanding that.
We hope you all had a WONDERFUL Christmas and New Years and please accept our Love and Hugs to all of you!
-Mark and Amy
