Finding Fulton: The one I didn't think I'd get to write for a long time....

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11

To say we got our referral quickly is basically the understatement of the century. This is what was supposed to happen months and months from now.

Apparently, God had other plans for us and for our daughter.

On June 5th, I had emailed our agency trying to get an idea of a time line. They don't like to get anyone's hopes up, so time frames are very general, but basically she said to expect 6-18 months for a referral (adoption speak for being matched with a baby), sometimes more, sometimes less. This time frame is after you have you paperwork done, which we don't.
I'll be honest, I didn't think we'd wait long. Our adoptions with Dex and Quinn were super quick. I was hoping our luck would hold up one last time, but even I never expected this.

I was completely caught off guard when on June 13th, one week later, we received an email from the same sweet lady at our agency. Would we be interested in reviewing the file of an 18 month old baby girl named Zi Shu? Um YES!!! I was on my way home from work when it came through at 5:19 pm.
I called Jason and told him we'd gotten a referral. I wish I could say I waited till I got home so we could look at the pictures together like all the other adoption stories I read about, but that's just not how I roll. I totally cheated and looked at the pictures without him.

We at least read the file together. As we read her file, things started getting real. Little Zi Shu's 18 months of life was condensed to 3 tiny pictures and a few pages of information that was almost 10 months old.

We read things that made us laugh and even more that made us cry.

We both kept trying to find the catch-she seemed to good to be true. She was completely gorgeous. We were falling and falling hard. Dangerously, quickly, head over heels in love.

We knew we wanted to find out more about this little girl. By then, the agency was closed for the night. We spent the evening analyzing every detail of those 3 little pictures.

We both agreed that she looks like Sarah in this picture.

The next morning I had Zi Shu's file ready for Dr Stoltz to review. It was a huge relief to get his seal of approval, no guarantees, some unknowns, but no huge red flags.

We were hoping to get some more recent information, our agency had requested it, but it's an orphanage. On the other side of the world. She basically said she didn't know if she would get an update and doubted she could get it in the 72 hours we had to make a decision.

Apparently this would be a leap of faith.

Again, God showed his hand. The update was already there, and it had the information we needed.

On Monday, June 17th we submitted our Letter of Intent officially requesting to adopt Zi Shu. By Thursday her file was officially locked in for us. We were told to expect our PA (pre approval) from China within a few weeks. Just 7 days later our PA arrived! This little girl is meant to be ours, there is simply no question about it.