she has a name

She already has a name.  And that name is important, because it was given to her by her birth momma.  The amazing woman who placed this baby for adoption after caring for her both in the womb and then for a period of time after she was born.  We are so thankful to her.  Though we may never meet, her birth mom is so very precious in my eyes and gave us such an amazing gift.

With the love that her birth mom likely invested in choosing a name, we wanted to honor that and include it in the name we will ultimately give her as our daughter. Her life began somewhere else, and we want to honor that as well.  Her Korean name is translated phonetically as Ru-a.

Even before we were pregnant with Grayson, Jon has a dream where he wrote a book and the forward was to his daughter.  So for 5 plus years we have been holding onto a girl's name for the potential daughter I truly believed would never come.

So we decided to name her...

Eliza Ruth Noto

And we will call her...

Ru

I love that the name we have been saving for our daughter is now able to be given.  Eliza means oath from God.  For those that deeply know our story over the past year and a half, know how insane and incredible it is to have arrived at this merciful place of waiting to meet our daughter.  We could not have seen this coming.  I would walk those roads a million more times to get to this place if needed.

Ruth was my mom's middle name.  So when the referral came through and we saw sweet baby Ru, my heart melted.  How amazing is it that in one name we can honor two significant women in her life who she may not meet/remember this side of heaven?  Sweet Ru you have been surrounded by strong women. From your birth momma, to your foster momma.  We have learned that Ru's foster mom has been taking care of babies in the foster system for many years.  She repeatedly loves these little ones knowing they are ultimately heading to their forever homes and are only in her care for a season. And the sleepless exhausting newborn season, at that.  One of the best parts of adopting a toddler is never having to have a newborn again.  

My prayer is that the fingerprints that these women have placed on her heart will be there forever.    I don't really believe that my mom is watching me from heaven, or that she knew about Ru before I did.  I am not sure how the veil between heaven and earth works, but I do hope and pray that the true, strong, good, and loving things that my mom invested in me can be passed down to sweet Ru in a way that only a mother and daughter can understand. 

Guys, I'm so freaking excited to turn in my "boy mom" card.  I LOVE my boys with every fiber in my being.  We fully expected this third child to be a boy.  I have saved all my boy clothes and had bought a couple new 18 month old boy things for our 3rd boy from Korea.  (Korea adopts out almost all boys to international families). I intended to hold that "boy mom" card my entire life.  But, after being matched with Ru and allowing myself to truly embrace the thought of a daughter, I think I can fully admit how much I wanted this and how incredibly generous God is.  

Seriously I could just cry saying "it's a girl" for the millionth time.  It's a girl.  

Annnnnnd cue the water works.

And as incredibly excited I am to have a daughter for myself, I am equally as excited to see Jon with a daughter.  I think it will jack him up in so many wonderful ways.  Also, Grayson's excitement for a sister is contagious, but not quite contagious enough for Asher to get on board.  Asher found some rogue blue confetti that the cousins were playing with and ran to me excited that it was a brother.  Sorry little buddy.  He will come around eventually.

So here we are.  In the waiting.  The average time until custody is 9-12 months.  We knew this when we signed on.  We knew how hard the wait would be.  Many people ask why it takes so long.  Politics.  We have submitted everything we possibly could as quickly as we possibly could, and now we wait for the Korean court to push our case through.

We would love if you would support us, pray with us, and love us in the waiting.

In my previous post I talked about our family's motto of sharing our abundance.  The deeper we get into this adoption process and just life in general, the more I want to cling to that standard.  I want to build the longest table and have the shortest fence.  Our friends and family have been so incredibly generous.  With our fun fair we were able to reimburse ourselves for our home study and get back up to baseline.  We cannot thank everyone enough for how freely they gave and how loved we felt.

In accepting Ru as the referral for ur family, we had to pay up front the majority of the fees to both Korea and Holt.  God has been so faithful to us in growing Jon's practice that we were able to write that check.  6 months ago I would not have imagined that to be possible.  

What lies ahead are our travel expenses and a handful more minor fees.  For a Korean adoption you have to travel to Korea, twice.  We hope that our remaining fundraisers can help us to raise money for these expenses when they arise and are hoping to raise approximately $5000 more dollars.

If you want to come alongside us in our adoption journey, here is what we need :)

1. Your crap.

Well really your decent things that I can sell at a garage sale, and maybe baked goods.  We are accepting any and all decent crap until May 17th.  If you can drop it off at my house in Des Plaines I would love you long time.  If you are an excellent baker I would also take you up on some baked goods.  Who doesn't want to buy lemonade, baked goods, and garage sale crap from these hooligans?

You know you want to.

2. Buy some t-shirts, share the page, and live the motto. 

T-SHIRT FUNDRAISER NOW LIVE!!!

We are going to run a bonfire campaign starting in the next couple of days. Here you can buy high quality t-shirts, sweat shirts, and kids shirts that support our adoption and will help us to be able to hop on a flight the second they tell us we can come get our sweet baby Ru.  We made the shirts simple and the link is meant to be shared.  If you have other friends and family who also hope to share their abundance, they are so very welcome to buy a shirt. I want to make it a movement, but I wasn't creative enough to come up with the longer table quote myself.  This abundance thing is all I got, but when lived out, I think it is all I ultimately want and what I want to deeeply instill in my children.

3.  Pray for us.  Please.  These are precious times before dethroning Asher, who is the best youngest child ever.  He's so squishy and cuddly and whiney.  I mean really he nails the "baby of the family" role. I want to be so very present with these boys and with Jon before our family is wonderfully interrupted by a baby girl.  

So there it is.  Her name, an update, and more requests. I'll leave you with this.  The sweetest fat bracelet you have ever seen.  I love Ru's chunk so very much and hope her wrist is still buried deep in the pudge when we meet in real life.