April 27

April 27, 2011

Dear Lucy Hope,

We didn’t have a good day here in Alabama. There were several storms that caused a lot of damage and hurt in people’s lives. It came so close to our house that the roof was damaged and trees in the backyard were blown down by the strong winds. We had to help several of our friends whose homes had been demolished. It was a very sad day. I’m glad you didn’t have to see this. Lily Grace and Lia Faith weren’t scared during the storm because they didn’t know how bad it was. After the storm had passed and we had no power, they began to understand little by little what had happened. We had a tornado, a very large tornado, that came through our community destroying everything in its path. Homes, cars, schools, ballfields, anything standing above ground was destroyed in its path. Hundreds of homes and many churches did not survive the winds of the tornado.

Austin and I watched from the back porch as long as we could, in horror at what we were seeing. Even then, however, we didn’t really know how bad it was. When the power never returned to our house, we decided to go over to Memaws and see if her house was still there and had power. As we left our neighborhood, that’s when we began to realize how badly the storm and damaged our community. Nearly everything was gone in some areas and we could see emergency workers and people trying to dig out from under what the tornados left behind. At the end of the day, we finally realized that over 65 tornados had hit our state and that several hundred people had lost their lives in the storms. It took our state over a week to recover to the point of being able to provide power to the remaining homes, so we spent time at Memaw’s while we waited.

We are humbled and thankful that God had spared us. I know that He has plans for us that include you. So we continue our journey to find you and bring you home. Since we had nothing else to do, we called Lifeline and asked if there was anything we could do to get closer to bringing you home. They suggested we go ahead and try to get our fingerprints done in Birmingham while we were off work waiting for the power to be restored. So, we drove to Birmingham and the good people at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security went ahead and did our fingerprints on May 3, 2011. Now, they send those off to be part of our home study and our adoption paperwork. It was good that we were able to get these done while we were off work anyway. Now, we’re one step closer to our Lucy Hope!

Love,

Mommy, Daddy, Austin, Lily Grace, and Lia Faith

Note: I wrote this in Lucy's journal last year and didn't get around to posting it until now. How surreal it  is that I should be posting this today, given that the same thing has happened to our community of East Limestone again on March 2, 2012. This time Austin and I were not on the back porch, we were somewhere in the air between Beijing and Guangzhou, China.