Entering The Big Wait

At 1:30 pm yesterday we packaged up 15 documents, 12 pictures and a whole lotta money in a box. Then we turned that box over to Fed Ex so they could send it to our agency in Colorado. That box was our dossier. That box held all of our hopes and dreams for a little boy known as Dang Ao Zhuang. A little boy that we will call Liam.
The 2 pounds of papers in that box represented nearly an entire year's worth of effort on our part, it represented meetings and inspections, documentation of every aspect of our life, heartfelt requests, it represents the love that we already have for that little boy.
I can not believe how I feel. It feels like when you are running and you stop for just a moment or two to hopefully help that stitch in your side let up. Your standing there, all sweaty and in pain and your heart is pounding and you have this moment of just breathing and feeling yourself standing there, calm. You know that in a moment you will be back running with your legs pumping and your heart pounding just as fast as ever, but for now, you are just there. In the quiet, breathing. That’s me right now. I am standing and I am hunched over and I am catching my breath for the next thing to come.
The Big Wait.
The Final Push.
Umm, errr,... well okay. The next to last wait.
The last wait will be of course, those excruciating days between our Travel Approval(TA) and the actual travel.
This next thing coming up? I call it The Big Bear. We will wait for China to receive our Dossier and send us a Letter of Acceptance (LOA), then we will send THAT back to China and await that TA mentioned above.
I expect that this section of The Wait will be the one that almost does me in. I mean, I am completely out of it. There is nothing that I can do to speed things up, there is nothing that I can do to stop my son from growing anymore. I will have to trudge through daily life and pretend that I am actually thinking about what everyone is talking to me about. I will have to spend my days just lingering here. Waiting for word. Waiting for permission to hold my child. Not easy folks. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Right now though I am happy. I am triumphant. I have succeeded. I managed somehow to compress all of our love and desire for that one little person into two pounds of paper. Right now I will breathe. Because The Big Bear will descend Monday at 10:30 am, when I know that our agency has that box.