Grace has many memories of life in China.\u00a0 That makes so much sense.\u00a0 She’s a bright, imaginative, intelligent little girl (and that’s not just me bragging!).\u00a0 She spent almost a full seven years in her orphanage.\u00a0 The kids there were her world and definitely her family.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a family there always seems to be those you are happy to see occasionally, those who seem easier to get into a tiff with and those who are ever enmeshed with you at a heart level.\u00a0 Those are the ones that help mold you and who you can never separate from because they are such a part of your experience that it is impossible to know where you ended and they began.\u00a0 This is the case with Grace’s heart sister.<\/p>\n
By all accounts they shared a crib and then slept next to one another in their low framed, high barred toddler beds.\u00a0 Once they grew to about six years of age they were moved to a new floor and building with bunk beds that was used for the older kids.<\/p>\n
When we met Grace she had numerous photos with her.\u00a0 Within moments of meeting her she wanted to show us the photos and would list off her friends and the workers and her volunteers and we began to get glimmers of the very large and people-filled world she lived in.\u00a0 She was so blessed to have a volunteer (several in fact) that obviously were taken with her (more on that another day) and there were many photos of one little girl in particular(YF) with Grace.\u00a0 We just assumed that they were good friends and that perhaps they were best friends.\u00a0 She would talk of many girls, but we kept waiting for YF to\u00a0be adopted\u00a0a few weeks after we returned home – surely that would be comfort to her.\u00a0 Funnily enough, the girls saw each other on Skype, chatted a bit (I enjoyed meeting her new family!), but she was still crying at night for her friend.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A couple of months later, we received word from Grace’s volunteer X that he was registered to be married.\u00a0 Grace was happy\u00a0 and suddenly married people and weddings were of new interest to her.\u00a0 A few days later, after much miscommunication and poor Mandarin on my part, we discover that it is YF’s volunteer, JY, \u00a0is X’s new wife.\u00a0 And suddenly, it makes sense.\u00a0 X and JY were the connection between Grace and YF, not the other way around.\u00a0 Are you following? lol\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soooo, with that in mind, I start back tracking to other things I know.\u00a0 The orphanage staff had told us (even since coming home) that Grace’s best friend had been adopted before her and was living in the US.\u00a0 I had been able to make contact with another family that adopted from her CWI at the same time and was told that “Yes”, they had met the family, but the family had seemed uninterested in a further relationship.\u00a0 The girl in question was MH.\u00a0 When I would ask if it was MH that she was missing, she would repeatedly smile and say, “No”.\u00a0 sigh… back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, over the past 4 months, Grace has spent literally hours pouring over her photos.\u00a0 She would always list off everyone in the photos.\u00a0 There were many stories about X, but never a whole lot about the other children, other than their names.\u00a0 That is until a few weeks back.\u00a0 Suddenly after many weeks home, in her hopeless, sad, exhausted cry, she began calling out for MP at night.\u00a0 There was a name!\u00a0 And I knew just who she meant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0MP is a little girl that I had picked out of Grace’s photos from the beginning.\u00a0 I had prayed for her, even thought, “Wow, I wish we could go back for her”, but kind of let it go.\u00a0 Suddenly a few weeks back, all of that changed.\u00a0 God laid her heavily on my heart one morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grace has many memories of life in China.\u00a0 That makes so much sense.\u00a0 She’s a bright, imaginative, intelligent little girl (and that’s not just me bragging!).\u00a0 She spent almost a full seven years in her orphanage.\u00a0 The kids there were her world and definitely her family.\u00a0 In a family there always seems to be those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,21,13],"tags":[5,64,6,59],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningtogetherathome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}