生日快乐 (shēngrì kuàilè)

As I am ending my day, the sun rises in China on the next day.  My little girl has already said goodbye to 4 and is waking to being 5 years old.  I wonder what her day will bring.  I wonder if her day will be any different than any of the other ones.  Will someone tell her happy birthday?  Will someone make her feel loved and special?

We recently sent a package to Elie.  I had longed for the moment to be able to send her something so that she would know that we are her family.  Our agency required that we wait until this point in our adoption to send anything.  When we got the green light to put together a package though it was more difficult than I expected.  We could only send one padded envelope, it needed to be light and not contain anything valuable.  What could I put in that envelope to prepare her to meet us and to make her feel loved???  After much thought and prayer I finally settled on these contents:

• Artwork from each of her siblings
• a small box of crayons
• a small paper tablet
• 3 packages of stickers
• a red tshirt with a sparkly american flag butterfly (her favorite color is red and I wanted something with sparkles.  Tyler spotted this one at Target and decided that Eliana had to have it)
• a birthday card that sings "happy birthday" when you open it and I tried my best to write out            生日快乐 / shēngrì kuàilè in my own handwriting on the card
• a disposable camera with instructions on how to use it (given by our agency) asking that they take pictures of her, where she lives, the people caring for her, etc.
• a list of questions for her caregivers to answer to hopefully give us some insight into the past 5 years of her life.  Our agency gave us a list of questions they suggest.  We used some of these and then my dear friend Mei helped me to write some additional ones.  (On a side note God has been so good to provide us with friends who speak and write Mandarin!!!)
• a photo album with pictures of our family and our home all labeled in both English and Mandarin.  In the front of the album is a letter from Kevin and I to her.  I tried hard to explain in a way that a little girl could understand how special she is and how much we love her and cannot wait to see her. 

And that was it.  It was stuffed, sealed, and sent to China.  The tracking says that it arrived on June 14th.  My prayer is that she has it now and that as she is waking up to her birthday she can somehow feel that halfway around the world her mama's heart is just aching to be with her.  My heart hurts for the five years that I have missed and for one more birthday where we are not together.  But I am not without hope.  In a matter of weeks that precious girl is going to be my daughter forever and I will never miss a birthday ever again.  This time next year we will have finished celebrating her last day of 5,  I will be up to my elbows in cake batter, winded from blowing up so many balloons, and up late making sure that her birthday is the best day ever.