Tomorrow is a very special day. It's my sister's 8th birthday! Time sure has flown by these past 7.5 years she has been in my life. Yes, I do know i said 7.5 years. I'm sure most people close to me know, but to those who don't my sister is adopted. about 10 years ago, my parent began the long process of an international adoption. For any family, this is a big decision, but after a near 2 year process, we successfully received word on my baby sister.
I remember being called to the office in 6th grade, and i was almost freaking out because I thought I had done something wrong, but boy I was wrong. The secretary handed me a fax and told me it was sent from my dad's work. I looked down on it and tears welled up in my little 11 year old eyes. It was a black and white fuzzy picture of my chubby baby sister-to-be.
The next 3 months or so went by extremely slow, but my parents and I were busy getting our shots and passports for our upcoming journey to China. Then the SARS epidemic hit. We were terrified that they would halt all adoptions or worse, halt adoptions and reassign us a new baby. We were already connected with chubby little 'Ju-Chi Yue.' She was part of our family. Even though we had all these doubt and were frightened something bad would happen, plans were still set with one exception. My parents decided that I shouldn't go to China. This pretty much devastated me, but there was nothing I could do or say to change their minds. So they left for China, a two week adventure to get my sister, in the beginning of May (coincidently over my 12th birthday.)
It was a long and difficult 2 weeks. I was staying at my grandparents house with them and my aunt, so it was anything torturous, but the waiting for my family to come home was hard. At least I had school, softball, and my birthday to keep me distracted.
The day they came home was one of the best days of my life. I don't know if I would have appreciated it as much as I did if I was younger, but because I was old enough to comprehend everything, it was all the more special. It's hard to describe the feelings and emotions I had that day in May of 2003, but it was incredible. Also, because of SARS, we all had to be quarantined for 10 days, so we had forced bonding time thrust upon us and on the last day we went to Disneyland, our first family outing.
Julie means more than anything in the world to me, and I'm so blown away at how she has grown and who she is becoming.
So Happy Birthday (tomorrow) Julie. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly :)
Holly
No comments:
Post a Comment