Then one morning, between the tears a whisper of a thought gently entered my heart. I would lay our child’s remains to rest beneath the soil of a potted plant. Instantly, I knew just which flower pot it had to be in. Two Christmas earlier my green-thumbed little sister had painted a beautiful clay pot, for me, I had admired it, but never thought I would actually use it. I have never had any ‘luck’ with plants. Hating the guilt of one brown plant after another, I had long before begun avoiding being encumbered with any. Now, that clay pot came to my mind, and I knew where our child had to be buried. Even the lines from the poem that my little sister had painted in flowing gold script on that flowerpot years earlier seemed fitting for just the purpose the flowerpot was to serve:
“A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.”
I searched and searched for that flower pot, unearthing boxes that hadn’t been peeked in since I had moved into my husband’s house nearly a year earlier. The flowerpot was no where to be found. Finally, in desperation, I broke down and called Grant at work to ask if he had any idea where the flowerpot might be. In spite of my efforts at nonchalance, not far into our conversation, I had broken down into tears over the clay pot that I couldn’t find. He couldn’t understand why his wife would be so distraught over a lost clay pot, but assured me that he would find it for me as soon as he got home. Before the call had ended though, he had gently pried out of me why I wanted that specific flower pot and why the urgency. Rather than thinking me hysterical or foolish, he quietly asked that even if I did find the pot myself before he got home, that I wait until he was there before I placed the remains beneath the plant. When he arrived home that night, I had a small peace lily waiting. The small plant was covered with beautiful, simple, white blooms. Grant located the missing flowerpot within a few minutes.
Together we talked about the child we would never hold. We cried together. We prayed together. Then we laid the remains of that child beneath a small lily. And, for the first time in days, I felt peace mingled in with my sadness.
Within a few weeks, all of the blooms had turned brown and dropped from the plant. Year after year, the plant grew and grew until it filled the clay pot, but never in all those years did another single bloom bud. Even as year after year I waited for the second pregnancy which would never come. Somehow, it always seemed fitting to me over the years to come that that peace lily should never again be covered in brilliant white blooms. It remained the only tended plant inside or outside of our house. Thinking back on it now, I suppose the miracle is that it survived my brown thumb at all…not that it went year after year without ever blooming again!
Years later, my husband and I began the long process of going through testing. The problems were identified and they seemed ‘fixable’. The very week, we began our in-vitro attempts, a single, elegant, snow-white bud appeared on the lily. I was never one to trust in ‘signs’ and especially not one to look for them…but, that beautiful white flower was such an encouragement to me through all the hormonal ups and downs of our treatments. For me it became a continual reminder of God’s assurance that He did have a child for us. Still we lost the first three embryos almost immediately…and within months we would lose the remaining four. That one, lone bloom on the plant had lasted so very long. But, it was finally beginning to fade as we began our adoption paperwork.
We had originally planned to adopt from Russia. It was simply the first country that my husband I both agreed on. Seemed logical, to go to a country from where our child would appear to be an ethnic match with ourselves. Grant would have been willing to adopt domestically. I would have too, before we had grieved so many losses. But, after losing those last little souls, I needed to find purpose and meaning in our loss. In my heart, if we gave a child a home that might never have enough to eat or shelter without us, then the terrible losses we had suffered together would have purpose. We prayed about it, as we prayed about everything, together. We felt strongly that we should adopt through one particular Christian led organization. So, I called Holt International to get more information about adopting a baby from Russia. The woman on the phone told me that Holt had just pulled out of Russia. She hurried to assure me, though, that there were many other fine organizations still active in that country. I explained that we were more set on which organization we wanted to work through, than which country we wanted to adopt from and asked her to please list for me what countries they were still active in. She began reeling off country after country as I furiously scribbled them all down, trying to keep up with her.
Then about eight or so countries into the list, she said ‘China’. That word just leaped out and stopped me cold. I knew in that moment with more certainty than I had known anything since we had begun trying to start a family, that our child, our daughter, was waiting for us in China.
I stopped the woman (by then already another several countries down the list!) and asked her that she send us all the paperwork needed to get started on an adoption from China. As I hung up the phone, I marveled that China had never so much as crossed my mind as a possibility (I didn’t even realize before that moment that adoptions from China were possible.)…yet, I knew that is where our child was. I had already begun praying for her safety in my heart as I called my husband at work. I knew where our child was, but I wanted to see if Grant would know it in the same way. I wanted that affirmation! So, when I called him I didn’t tell him what I was feeling in my heart. I just nonchalantly informed him that Holt was no longer working in Russia. His response to that surprise was the same as mine had been. He just instantly dropped the idea of a Russian baby and asked me what countries they were placing children out of. I picked up my list and began reading through the names of all the countries I had written down. My husband listened quietly until the word China rolled off my lips, no differently than the eight or so countries I had listed ahead of it. The moment I said ‘China’, though, it hit him just as powerfully as it had me. My husband had never had any interest in China, himself. Once I had tried to get him to learn a little Chinese with me and he had made it quite clear that he never had any intention of traveling anywhere where English wasn’t the primary language and he had no ability for picking up words from another language…especially a tonal language like Chinese. Now, here was this same man, not even thinking about considering other countries, Asian or not, many of whom didn’t require the parents to travel to adopt. He dreaded leaving the United States, yet he, too was sure that his daughter was over in China…a country that requires parents to travel to the country to adopt their child.
We began our paperwork immediately. It was to be a mountain of paperwork by the time we were finished months later. Then began our wait for the Chinese government to review our paperwork and photos and choose what child they wanted to match to our family. China has a very strict ‘one child’ policy for their own citizens and for this reason, at that time, they were also fairly stringent with their policies for international adoption. They did not allow for foreign couples to adopt healthy infants unless the couple was completely childless (not even any step-children) and both parents-to-be were 35 years old or older. Grant and I neither one were quite old enough yet, to qualify for a healthy baby, so we had applied for a ‘special needs’ child. We trusted that God would not send us a child whose challenges were more than we would be able to handle. We both already knew in our hearts that though technically we could turn down the ‘match’ the Chinese government made for us and request another infant, instead, that we would not do so. Whatever child was first assigned to us would be our child.
From the first moment we had both known in our hearts that we would adopt from China, we had begun praying for our daughter. We knew enough about the orphans in China to be certain we would be assigned a girl. We learned a lot more about those children than we had ever known in the months as we raced to complete our paperwork. (From the moment we had decided to adopt from China, I had been filled with such an urgency. We completed everything in record time, even making several trips to our state capital, Jefferson City, to avoid the delay of the postal system.) The more we learned, the harder we prayed for Darcy by name (long before we had seen her photo or been told her Chinese name). Just after they had sent us Fu Wei Qian’s photo (Darcy), the news media was rocked with graphic film footage that had been smuggled out of China by a British group.
Human Rights Watch—Asia began bombarding the news with information about the ‘dying rooms’ in so many of China’s overcrowded orphanages where the sick babies and even those who were simply deemed as too demanding were shut away and left to starve to death, unattended. We saw news clips of the skeletal babies lying alone in those dark, windowless rooms starving to death, unwanted, their weak, kitten-like cries unheeded. We knew that Wei Qian would not be placed in a dying room, since she had already been assigned to us. Yet, we also knew that she was in a country where there wasn’t enough food to eat in the orphanages and there wasn’t enough staff to care for all the abandoned children. Our social worker had told us that we should expect to find raw rings around our baby’s wrists and ankles since it was common for the older infants to be tied spread eagle onto ‘potty chairs’ from morning until night. Then, they would be tied into their cribs to keep them from tumbling over the low sides (more like ‘baby trays’ than Western ‘cribs’).
Suddenly, China was in the news everywhere. We saw documentary after heart-wrenching documentary about the conditions in Chinese orphanages. We saw more film footage shot in another of the orphanages…rows and rows of toddlers with their arms and legs tied to the arms and legs of their potty chairs as an older child (about four years old) went down the line, brutally head-butting baby after tied-down baby. No adults around. Some of the babies cried out in pain, but one child just stared blankly forward in quiet resignation as the older child brutally banged heads with her over and over again. The images broke my heart. And, I had heard of other parents (one even with our same organization) who had gotten over to China just to be told, “I’m sorry. Your child died yesterday, but we have assigned another one for you to take her place.” I didn’t want just any child from China. I wanted my child. I wanted Fu Wei Qian, our Darcy Lin Wei Qian.
As all the political turmoil swirled around China’s inhumane orphanage conditions, the adoptions ground to an excruciatingly slow pace. Month after month, China failed to come through with granting us permission to enter the country to adopt the child they had assigned us. There was a very real threat that the country would close its doors completely to international adoptions in response to having been made to lose face throughout the world over the recently exposed conditions in its orphanages. During that time, a well-meaning friend had told Grant and I that if China did close down their international adoptions before we could get Darcy out, that we could adopt a child here in town from the Light House, instead. I knew the friend was only trying to help…but it showed how little she understood.
That baby in China wasn’t just any baby. She was my baby. I already knew in my heart that if she died before we could reach her…or if China changed their minds and wouldn’t let us come for her after-all, that Grant and I would be childless. There would be no more adoptions. Wei Qian was my child and if I lost her I would not choose to be a mother ever again.
I agonized over what was happening to my daughter, half a world away. More than anything else, those nine months we spent filing paperwork, awaiting child assignment, and then awaiting permission to come for our child, I prayed that our baby would feel loved. That, even if she had to go hungry, at least God would send someone to hold her when she cried. I couldn’t bear the thought of her crying hour after hour with and no one ever responding or caring. I knew that in the orphanages, the workers were too few to be able to care for so many children. The normal ratio was a single worker to completely care for twenty infants. Feeding, by necessity, consisted only of a hurriedly propped bottle as the worker would move down the line to the next baby. If the child wiggled and lost her hold on the nipple, she simply missed that meal. There was no time in the orphanages for the luxury of comforting or cuddling any of the babies, they were lucky to get fed. Yet, as I prayed, I knew in my heart, those many months of waiting (long before I had ever seen her photo or known what name she was called by in the orphanage) that God was protecting my baby. I didn’t know if it was through an orphanage worker that just had an inexplicable soft spot for my daughter, or if it was through an older child in the orphanage who would take the time to hold and love my daughter. I simply knew deep in my heart that, against all odds, someone was holding my daughter and comforting her when she cried…loving her for me, even as we desperately waited for permission to come and bring her home.
Then, China began lobbing missiles at Taiwan…all the while escalating its rhetoric against the United States whom it blamed for encouraging Taiwan’s refusal to abandon the elections they were planning on holding. When China began lobbing missiles into Taiwanese waters and threatening to lob them right on to Taiwan, itself, we had just received travel approval to come and adopt our daughter. But, the date that China had given us to enter their country was the day after the elections were to be held in Taiwan…the elections that China was bound and determined to prevent at any cost…the elections that China was blaming on the United State’s support of Taiwan. Though we would be in Hong Kong, a few days before the Taiwanese election, we were not scheduled to receive our VISAS to enter China until the day after the election. My heart was breaking. I was so afraid that we would be in Hong Kong (still British controlled back then) only to be turned away from entering China, itself, at the last moment, in retaliation for Taiwan refusing to abandon its elections. It was at that low point in my life that I cried out to God. I had long since come to associate that single white bloom that had appeared on my peace lily so long ago with little Fu Wei Qian, half a world away. I had always been grateful that God had sent that little bloom…for whether it was a sign or not, it had been such an encouragement to me through such a hard time when we had been losing those little embryos. Yet, a few nights before we were to leave for Hong Kong, as I felt on the brink of yet one more loss, I wondered in my heart why God hadn’t saved that little white bloom of encouragement for now. Why had He sent it before we had even begun considering adoption? Why hadn’t He waited until now when my heart was breaking for Wei Qian? These were the thoughts tumbling about in my heart, when something struck me that took my breath away. Early Fall of ’94, when that one small flower of hope had appeared didn’t just co-inside with when we began our fertility treatments… For the first time ever, I realized that that would have been the very time that Wei Qian (born July Fourth, 1995), would have been conceived. Always before, I had envisioned God browsing through the abandoned infants and choosing one for us. It knocked the breath out of me to realize in that moment that He never browsed through the children in the orphanage. He had chosen Wei Qian for us even before her own birth mother could have been aware of her presence in her own body. He had chosen Wei Qian to be our child from the moment of her conception. And, in that moment, I knew in my heart that nothing was going to prevent us from reaching our daughter…not all the missiles in China could stand in the way of God’s purpose!
Less than a week later, we left Hong Kong with a small band of four other families and traveled by train to GuangZhou. From there, we were to take a plane to Nanchang. To our collective horror, we soon realized that none of us had any idea which plane we were suppose to board in GuangZhou and for the first and only time we were completely without a guide or translator. It was with genuine joy that we spotted a huge group of American couples following a translator down the hallway. We very quickly discovered that they were bound for the same city as we were and the very same hotel. They too were adopting. We gratefully fell into their wake and followed them onto the correct plane. They were not to get their babies until the following day. They had gone through a different organization than we had and their babies were coming from a different city than ours. We all wound up on the same floor of the same hotel though! The management wisely reserved the fourth floor for no one but new adoptive parents, in that capital city of JiangXi where we had come to receive our new daughters.
On the bus from the airport to our hotel, our interpreter (having just joined us!) informed us that we would have our babies within the hour (not the following day, as our agency had told us)…but what he said next made my heart leap! He said that the babies had come up from Lin Chuan to our hotel in Nan Chang by bus with their foster mothers! I can still remember the first moment those words sunk in! We had been told that our babies were in the orphanage all those months of waiting. Not even our adoption agency had realized that the babies had all gotten foster mothers…had indeed been the very first babies ever from that orphanage to have foster mothers! Darcy Lin Wei Qian had been found on the steps of Lin Chuan’s community center six days after her birth. She had only spent about six weeks in the orphanage before being assigned a foster mother! (Her foster mother was a worker there at the orphanage and would take Darcy back home with her each evening. There her two grown, single daughters doted on the only baby in the family!) I met Wei Qian’s foster mother, Hai Ro, less than an hour after we arrived at the hotel.
I first saw that small, grandmotherly woman as she walked down the long hallway towards our room, carrying in her arms our tiny, wide-eyed baby, mummified in so many layers of clothes, that her little arms stuck out scarecrow fashion, her hands hidden by sleeves long enough for a child years older than she. I will forever remember Qian Qian (Darcy) being carried down the hotel hallway, towards our room…such a serious face for a baby…such piercingly intent eyes. She looked confident, though wary of us, from her perch in Hai Ro’s arms. As Hai Ro handed Wei Qian to my husband and said in Chinese in soft soothing tones, “Here is your father, Qian Qian,” the baby began to cry. Hai Ro told her “Bu tso. Bu tso.” (“Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”) and the baby quieted. Though Hai Ro did not show any emotion in her face I knew this woman loved my daughter.
We had been told in advance that we would only have two or three minutes with the translator, orphanage director and foster mother as our child was given to us. As our translator turned to leave, and Hai Ro turned to follow, I asked our translator to ask Hai Ro if she would like to hold Qian Qian one last time. As Hai Ro reached out for my daughter for the last time, I saw in her eyes, for just a fleeting moment, how her heart breaking as she prepared to leave the child she had held and loved for the past seven months.
At our invitation, Hai Ro lingered in our room after the others had left, to help change Darcy into her new clothes. I wanted to keep the clothes that Darcy came to us in…the only piece of her past that we could carry out of China. So, I had asked Fenhua (a student from China attending my old Bible college who had become a dear friend), to write a letter for me asking permission to exchange clothes I had brought, for the clothes my child was wearing. (Since we knew ahead of time that clothes are so desperately in need for other children, that the babies are usually stripped of everything they are wearing and their clothes taken by the orphanage officials as they leave.) The orphanage director had read the letter and nodded his head. Now, Hai Ro looked with interest at the clothes I took out of the baby’s suitcase. She found of particular interest the disposable diaper I had laid out for Darcy. Diapers are not used in China very often, and potty training begins when a child is still a new born. I had heard this, but questioned it. I thought it more likely that ‘mommies’ are trained to anticipate when the baby will need to potty. Eight and a half month old Darcy, soon proved me wrong on this point! While Hai Ro found Darcy’s new clothes engrossing, I found her old clothes engrossing. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find the rest of my tiny baby down there amongst all those layers! Each layer just led to the next. Layer after layer of carefully mended, thoroughly worn out old clothing that smelled strongly of woodsmoke. Many of the layers looked as if they had originally been made for a three or four year old. Finally, I peeled off the last layer.
Though we had been told even by the Chinese man that served as our translators, that the children would be filthy and in need of immediate baths, Wei Qian was very clean. Though she small for her age, she looked like she had been well cared for. Wei Qian hadn’t been too thrilled with these strange people (my husband and I!) from the start, but, the moment I began putting a diaper on her, she thought me the cruelest person imaginable. Though she was used to so many layers of clothing that she could not even move her own arms, she was not used to having the bulk of a diaper between her legs! Each of the layers of her clothes were split all the way through the crotch, traditional fashion for children…allowing them to relieve themselves without first undressing. Darcy already had her doubts, but Hai Ro, didn’t begin to wonder about my fitness as a mother until after I finished dressing Darcy. I had chosen a snuggly red, plaid flannel sleeper for her. Hai Ro first looked confused when I put the sleeper on Darcy, as though waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then she became alarmed. I was baffled by her increasing agitation as she told me over and over, “Bu hao kan! Bu hao kan!” I knew enough Chinese to understand the phrase but was perplexed by it. I couldn’t understand why she would suddenly turn with such ferocity and proclaim the clothes I had place my daughter in as ‘ugly’. Then she fingered the short sleeve of my bright yellow T-shirt and proclaimed it “Bu hao kan!” (“Not good-looking”) as well! Only as she left our room, determined to find someone to explain to us, did the meaning of her phrase began to dawn on me. Here she had been in our heated hotel room, still wearing a heavy jacket and who knows how many layers of clothes, herself. She was horrified when she realized we intended to dress our daughter in nothing more than a single thin layer of flannel! I am sure she genuinely feared the baby she had come to love, wouldn’t survive to make it back to America! Here these crazy, T-shirt wearing Americans were going to freeze that poor child before she even could leave China!
That was the last I ever saw of Hai Ro…her disappearing from our room filled with anxiety over Wei Qian’s safety. The translator dropped in a few minutes later and tactfully explained that Chinese babies were used to being well-bundled and might catch a chill otherwise. I had seen my daughter’s flushed cheeks before all the layers came off and didn’t think she was likely to chill in our very warm hotel room, but, I found a fluffy, padded outdoors playsuit to zip her up in. Something that wound up being a life-saver for me…since China is full of well-intentioned grandmothers to whom language is no barrier if a child is seen “ill-clothed”! But, in the privacy of our own hotel room, I would dress Darcy like any other American baby, much to her delight. She was a hot-natured baby! To this day, I think the child would go barefoot in the snow if I would allow it!
Darcy was a tiny child with a mammoth appetite! She was eight and a half months old when we got her, but she only weighed twelve pounds. Developmentally, she hadn’t progressed physically beyond the stage of a newborn. Once she was extracted from the many layers of clothing that had enveloped her, we discovered that her muscle tone was so poor that she couldn’t even support the weight of her own head. Her head flopped like a newborn’s. She was unable to sit. The muscles in her arms were so underdeveloped that without the support of her thick layers of clothing, both of her arms hung slackly behind her, almost as if both of her shoulders were dislocated. She moved her arms just using the larger muscles in her upper arm, in an odd flapping way. She had very poor fine motor skills. She could not bring her hands together in front of her, so atrophied were her muscles, nor could she raise her hands above shoulder level. Her little back swayed alarmingly and she could not initially tolerate being layed flat on her back. For the first week or so, we had to support the curve in her spine with a small pillow before she could lay comfortably on her back. Also, I suppose, a result of having spent her whole life entombed in an unyielding bulk of so many layers of clothing. She was not a special needs child, though. She was perfectly healthy by Chinese standards. She was typical of any Chinese baby in that area of the country—orphaned or not. In cold homes, with no source of heat other than a small fire, bundling the babies well was of more importance than seeing to it that they were able to move about and strengthen their muscles as babies do in the natural progression of growth. I was beginning to understand why my Chinese friend back home (Fenhua) had worried that I wouldn’t know how to care for a Chinese baby. I had laughed at her remark and assured her that a Chinese baby was no different than a Caucasian baby. Now I was beginning to understand what she had been trying to explain to me. Darcy was different from an American baby of the same age…because of her environment. Freed from the restrictive layers of clothes, in our warm hotel room, Darcy progressed with amazing speed. Within a few days, she was able to support her own head and we got to witness her discovering her own hands and feet for the first time! Soon she and I began a game where, holding her upright, facing me, I would bend down and, to her delight, kiss her hands. Each time, I would bend over just a little bit less, as she strained to raise her hands high enough to reach my face. Bit, by bit, the mobility in her arms was improving.
I have never seen any baby that could pack away as much food as our child did. The first hurdle was getting her to drink from a bottle, though. None of our babies would drink from a bottle. Finally we discovered that if we cut the hole so large in the nipple that the milk poured out freely, emptying the bottles within a matter of minutes, that our daughters would drink from bottles rather than insisting on only being fed the formula with a spoon or from a cup. That first day we discovered that our daughter was severely lactose-intolerant…finally realizing that when her foster mother had told us the baby ‘didn’t like milk’ what she had been trying to tell us wasn’t that she didn’t like the flavor of it, but rather that her system could not tolerate it. Soy formula is hard to find in China. Fortunately, one of the other families had brought soy formula with them, which their child detested and were only too happy to swap their soy formula for our regular formula. Darcy wasn’t too pleased with the taste of the soy formula, either, but she drank it none-the-less. She would drink an entire bottle of formula, greedily wolf down a huge bowl of baby rice cereal (screaming frantically between bites), only to react as though she had never been fed anything at all, moments later when we would sit down in the restaurant on the first floor of the hotel, to eat ourselves. She ate anything and everything off our plates that didn’t require teeth! She would pack away most of our dinner, too…screaming ever frantically between each bite that she gulped down. Eventually her appetite resumed more normal proportions, but her appetite those first few weeks was truly amazing. By the time we returned to America, she had gained two pounds and I had lost five (unable myself to grab more than one mouthful for every three or four that I hurriedly filled her mouth with to quiet those frantic screams of hers that welled up each and every time at the very sight of food).
God truly answered our prayers. He protected Darcy so well from the moment she was born until the moment we could take her in our arms. He gave her a foster mother who did genuinely love her deeply…when foster mothers were still almost unheard of anywhere China and had never before been used in the orphanage Fu Wei Qian had been taken to.
That first night, none of our babies slept. Freshly bereaved of their foster mothers, thrown into the care of odd appearing people, whose words made no sense to them, our babies grieved their little hearts out.
They cried and cried and we cried and cried as we carried our inconsolable little ones up and down that long, brown, carpeted hallway. Darcy would only cease her crying if I remained standing while I held her—preferably walking. Whenever I looked down at the small child I was carrying, she would clamp her eyes tightly closed in feigned sleep. But, as soon as she felt my head straighten up as my gaze left her, those eyes would pop back open and I would feel those piercing black eyes of hers staring holes into me as we paced the hallway. She refused to make any eye contact at all with me, that first night…always squeezing her eyes tightly closed whenever I would look down at her. If I continued looking too long, she would cry in protest with eyes still squeezed shut. She did not sleep a single moment for those first twenty-four hours. The other babies all slept a little, but none of them slept much. The next morning, we were all bleary-eyed and we warned those families we had met in the airport at GuangZhou that their sleepless night was coming.
We were wrong. That afternoon, their end of the hall was eerily silent as their babies were brought to them. Their babies had come directly from the orphanage (a different orphanage than ours had come from). They had never had foster mothers. Even though their babies were listed as the same age as ours, our tiny babies dwarfed theirs in size. My child was so observant. Nothing escaped the scrutiny of her somber gaze. Their babies showed no interest in their surroundings. When I looked into their eyes, I didn’t see the unnerving, piercing gaze of my own child…just vacant eyes looking no where at all. My child raged at what had been taken from her…her foster mother, her language, her home, her routine. Their babies were silent. Their babies had long since learned that crying served no purpose. Their cries had gone unheeded until they had finally given up crying at all. It broke my heart to hear the silence that filled the far end of the hall our entire stay in Nanchang. And God showed me just how merciful and gracious He had been to my baby. My baby grieved long and hard. She had been well-loved and she had lost something that those other babies had never had. She had gained a family that loved her with all their hearts, but she didn’t know that yet…all she knew in that moment is that she had lost the people who had loved her and whom she had loved. I was so glad her little heart was breaking. I was glad she raged against her losses. I was so glad she wasn’t numb inside like the silent babies at the other end of the hall.
By the second day with us, she was willing to allow us to look her in the eye. On her third day with us, Darcy graced us with her very first smile and I knew that the healing of her own heart had begun. God had protected Qian Qian all those months when she was still half a world away from us. He had given her a family to love her those first eight months of her life while she was still beyond our own reach, half a world away. He had answered our prayers far better than we had even dared to hope He would.
Darcy's first smile for us...age 8 1/2 months.
Darcy today..
still smiling!
(age 11)
