16 years

Bulgarian Daylight Savings Time has a way of catching us coming and going! We learned on our very first trip to Bulgaria over three years ago that they, too, switch their clocks forward in the spring and back an hour in the fall. On that occasion, it caused a bit of a scramble; this time around, it meant that we were all up and ready to go at 7am our time, waiting to Skype with B to wish her a Happy Birthday! and...no call from our translator/facilitator. What's up? We emailed her, and got a quick reply back saying she'd be ready in an hour.

Hmmmm.

We thought the calls were *always* going to be at 7am because she leaves the office at 4pm her time (8am our time)! Who knows. Well, better to be early than to miss the call. It took a few minutes before Matt rightly speculated that they set their clocks back a week earlier than we do! Oops! We're not typically very good at remembering when the change in our own country, much less at keeping track of another country's system!

This was our third call with B, and the first one where all three of us (B, our family, and our translator) ALL had video of each other. The first week none of us could see. Last time we could see B, but she couldn't see us. Today we could all see each other - much better than the other options!

These calls with B are wonderful, but challenging at the same time. Working through a translator makes for slow going, and you're never sure how many nuances make it through. We want so much to connect with this sweet sixteen-year-old, but have such a short bit of history together to build on. We realize that these regular contacts are going to be really important for her to continue to build a picture in her mind of the new reality that is going to be hers in a few months, and to help give her something to look forward to, but each of the calls seems to fall short of that. We can say, "Obicham te," to her (and we do!) but what does that actually mean to her?

As Matt and I talked on our drive to church this evening, we realized that we'd both been thinking about this over the course of the day. Our understanding of love is one of a decision - a choice - not something you fall into or out of, or grow into (or out of!) but something you decide to DO. I think there's obviously much more to it than that, because I can definitely say that I've grown to love Matt more as my husband than when he was my boyfriend, and that my love for him has continued to grow as our marriage has progressed, but how we communicate to B that our love for her is not based on what she can accomplish, or what she looks like, or what we dream she will be, but is simply a matter of us choosing to love her as our daughter.

Yes, we'll hopefully have many years to help her to learn and understand this, but in the meantime, it feels like we have a fragile, tentative thread connecting us. It's strong and solid on our end, but we are very aware that, unlike in the case of Krassimir's adoption, B has the option to decide at the adoption court hearing that she prefers the familiarity of the limited world that she has always known to the unfamiliarity of all of the possibility of what it is to be a beloved part of a family that we hold out to her!

And all we get in the meantime are bi-weekly stumbling conversations about little things where we soak in her smiling face and her little mannerisms, and hopefully give her a chance to build familiarity and comfort with our smiling faces in a tiny window on a computer screen.

Sixteen years old today!!! But all of our paperwork that had to be submitted before this "final" of birthdays is long completed. We can just steadily keep moving forward toward the day when she is finally ours!!

~~~

We returned home from a short trip last week to the Provisional Approval Notice from USCIS!! The actual letter that needs to be sent to the US embassy in Bulgaria to get the next step moving has not yet been initiated, but now it's just a matter of when, not if. Hooray! One step closer!