New Year's Eve - 2010

December 31, 2010

Dear Lucy Hope,

It’s been an entire week since we prayed with the pastor and discovered God’s plan to bring you together with our family. So, we’ve been working on an application with Lifeline Children’s Services to adopt you into our family. We know the staff at Lifeline very well and we are sure that they will help us find you soon. Today, we finished that application and traveled to Birmingham to meet with Karla and Dave at Lifeline. They knew we were coming, but they were not sure why; although, I suspect they had figured it out by then. We wanted to make sure that we began this journey on the first day of 2011, so we wanted to submit our application to Lifeline on the last day of 2010.

We want you to know that every member of our family loves you and that you are very important to all of us. That’s why we all loaded up in the van and headed to Birmingham together. It’s New Year’s Eve in Alabama and we’re planning a new family, complete with another “sweet baby girl” to call our own. Austin is kind of quiet in the back as we ride to Birmingham, but Lily Grace and Lia Faith more than make up for the void with their endless chatter. I hope you’re able to get in a few words with them when you get home – you’ll just have to jump right in. They want to know if we’re going to bring you back from Lifeline today! So, we had to explain to them that it would take a while for all the details to be worked out, that this was just the first step in a long process that would eventually lead us to you and you to us. They understood that it might take a little while, but they both wanted you home as soon as possible. Austin just sat in the back smiling at the perceptions of two “sweet baby girls” of the new addition to our family. Having been through the process twice, I think he’s just conditioning himself for the wait, amused at the expectations of his impatient little sisters.

So, we turned in our application to Lifeline Children’s Services with Dave and Karla today so that we could be sure to start immediately in 2011! Everyone was excited that we’d reached this decision and were eager to get started. We planned to meet again sometime in January after we’d had a chance to complete some more paperwork! We also learned that since we had adopted Lily Grace and Lia Faith, new processes were involved that might lengthen our wait. New rules meant extra education, reading, and such, along with added approval steps. Ugh! We just want to find you and bring you home.

We Love You Lucy,

Mommy and Daddy

Love,

Jerry, Connie, Austin, Lily Grace, Lia Faith, and Lucy Hope

Green, Party of Six