Post-Referral Karma

We're still getting over the initial shock of actually having received our referral this week. I go to sleep looking at his picture, then dream of it, then awake wanting nothing other than to be in Ethiopia RIGHT NOW loving him. Our referral acceptance package arrived first thing Thursday morning, and it returned to CHI's office - signed, sealed, delivered - first thing Friday morning. He's on his way to being ours! We received an email from the Ethiopia Program Director estimating that a court date could come as quickly as 5 weeks from now (we were thinking more along the lines of 6-8 weeks) so karma seems to be pulling in our general direction for the time being. And yet my heart still sinks into my stomach every time I feel happiness about this as I know, I just know, that his first mother is in such a different place with this right now. While we celebrate a referral she questions or processes her decision and her son grieves the loss of a mother. Its hard to understand Karma and God through this sometimes.

On another seemingly karmic-influenced note we recently rekindled a friendship from our high school years with a dear friend who is now working at a clinic in Haiti as a pediatrician. She has very graciously helped us with multiple medical questions and if you haven't checked out her blog (also listed in my sidebar titled "This isn't Grey's Anatomy") I definitely recommend it - her perspective on the day-to-day in Haiti is eye opening to say the least. We were such good friends in our earlier years, completely lost touch for the past 10 or so years, and now have been reunited under completely random circumstances (random blog searching) yet both seem to be at a similar place in life with very similar hopes and dreams of where we desire to go from here. I love the randomness of how this kind of stuff happens!

Now off to enjoy and celebrate the weekend! It kicked off with an amazing Thai style halibut dinner with friends tonight (I will definitely post the recipe, it's delicious!) and we're going to begin finalizing some of the many decisions we had put off until we knew the gender/age of our child. I still can't believe it, yet his picture (the one in front of me right now) makes it real.