A Father's Perspective

Hello blog-o-sphere. This is Joel…the adoring husband of the primary author of this blog. My lovely wife Marianne has asked me to write a few posts on our adoption process from a father’s perspective. So in the next several posts (I plan to write on Wednesdays) I intend to narrate my journey down this road to adoption. Or perhaps I should rather say down this road to Darya, because ultimately the goal at the end of this road of adoption is a person. Waiting for us at the end of this path in an obscure Eastern European orphanage is a lovely little girl with almond shaped chocolate brown eyes and cute little ears that bend out slightly from beneath wisps of sandy brown hair.

This little girl turns two years old today. Two years without a family. Two years without a mother to love her and read to her. Two years without a father to dote on her and sing hymns softly to her as she falls asleep. Two years without brothers to protect her and play with her. Two years old today, but there will be no birthday party, no one to celebrate the day of her birth or to remind her how she was fearfully and wonderfully made; at least not in the country of her birth. But some 17,000 miles away on the other side of the globe there is an equally obscure family in North Florida that is celebrating her birthday, and longing for the day when she will be with them. This is the tale of how I came to love this little girl I’ve never met…