In the thick of it

Wow. What a last 24 hours we've had.

Last night, Matt got a nearly-complete set of the house drawings emailed off to the contractor who is going to help Matt with the large scale work (excavation, foundation, framing, windows, siding - that type of stuff). He's going to give us a sense of the cost of what we're looking at doing in a worst-case scenario. We're hoping that whatever number he comes back with will be higher than the actual cost because of time we can put in. This is one more of those steps that makes the whole thing seem more "real."

This afternoon, upon checking email after a dear friend was here all morning, we saw a very exciting email from our adoption agency; we have verbal approval of our application with the MOJ for K!!!! We still need to wait for the actual signature, but after emailing yesterday just to see if the dossier had even been translated yet (since we'd heard nothing, and it had been four weeks since it arrived over there), we were completely not expecting to hear today that it's been 1) translated 2) submitted to the MOJ and 3) verbally approved!! Our agency estimates (though no guarantees, for obvious reasons) that we will get the official signature on the referral and our travel date within the next two weeks. Hooray! Little boy, we're coming!

Less than an hour after that, Reu woke from his nap. Owen saw him waking on the visual monitor, and asked if he should run up to get him since I was occupied with Leah and math. He was back down rather quickly, telling me he thought Reuben was having a seizure. I ran up to find Reu in what definitely seems like the ending stages of what I'm guessing from Owen's description, was a tonic clonic seizure.

Reuben has been seizure free since November 27th (with the exception of one partial seizure in early December randomly in the middle of the afternoon.) This is BY FAR the longest seizure free stretch he's had since his seizures started when he was 14 months old. The previous record was 7 weeks seizure free; this was 14 weeks and 2 days. Reuben had been averaging one seizure a day for all of 2012 leading up to the "cease fire" in November. Matt has found it not coincidental that this long reprieve started soon after he expressed interest in K specifically, and a little over a week before we requested commitment documents for him. I haven't had a chance to write yet about some of those things that led us up to adopting K, but being Reuben's parents has been a critical part of that for both of us.

I can't help but notice the timing of Reuben having one, and possibly two, seizures an hour after we got this good news about K, and the day after we sent drawings to the contractor.

This is a thick time, and one in which we greatly cherish your prayers on our behalf. This is the first day that I've felt like we are in a serious battlefield. There is more that has happened in our lives in the last 24 hours, too, but it's of a nature that isn't relevant to this blog.

Oh. And Owen had the biggest splinter I've ever seen lodged in his foot. He took it like a real man, even though it took us nearly three hours on and off of digging and picking and pulling to get it out. And I can't help but think that this is part of the whole thing, too.

What a day. And yet I thrill knowing that God is in the thick of this with us - that it is his design, and I can't wait to see what tremendous things he is going to show us about himself through this time.