A special gift for a VERY special family…
This is such a touching story for me and I’m thrilled to share it with you all. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a LONG time. Mom and I have chatted for over two years about this adoption and I’m so happy to share their beautiful story with everyone!
Just to give you a little background….Mom is very passionate about adoption and wants to be a testimony to adoption and says, “If there is even one family who could have their heart moved to choose that journey and save one more of the 140 million orpahans in this world, I would do anything! My blog has been there for that reason and for Selah (whom they adopted) to someday see how much she has been loved..even “Before I met her!” Selah is from Bulgaria. Bulgaria has many orphans due to the fact that they used to be a communist country and have not fully recovered. Selah is also of Roma ethnicity which we know as “Gypsy”. These people are hugely mistreated and a deep vein of hatred runs throughout eastern Europe for these people. There is segregated education and families live in what they call “Gypsy Ghettos” in shacks and tents. The orphanages are filled with Roma children and most Bulgarians will not adopt a child of this ethnicity. The current statistic is that 90% of the orphans who do not get adopted will end up being sold into human trafficking. A horrifying though!”
I asked Mom to write me a story about how it all happened so you all could get a feel of what they went through and now what they have!
Go grab your tissues now, you’ll need them! {Sniff, Sniff}
“Our story with Selah is a God story. We found her, tried to adopt her and lost the referral to an Italian family. I ached and grieved in a horrible way and couldn’t seem to surrender her. I was a mess. After 5 months, I finally came to a point of finding peace. I told God I would give her back to Him…back to WHom she belonged and I would still be forever thankful for Him showing me how passionately I could love someone without even meeting them. He squelched any doubts that could have possibly ever existed about being able to love and adopted child as much as a birth child. I also thanked Him for the opportunity to pray for this little girl for the rest of my life…that I would be honored to pray for her even if I never met her. My prayer was that she would grow up with a family who knew and loved the Lord and that she would someday become the woman He had beautiful plans for! Not even two weeks later I log onto a yahoo international adoption chat group to see what was going on in the world of adoption. I had registered back when we first tried to adopt her, but I never again had the heart to go back to it until now. Well, to make a long story short, I weeded through 600 emails, sent a random email to a gal who really touched me with her story and with her positive outlook, built a friendship with this gal who after finding out our whole story, connected me to another gal who turned out to be someone (not even the Italian family…she was after them) who had gotten Selah’s referral, had gone to Bulgaria and realized that she just wasn’t meant to be her mommy. We connected and after over a month of these communications and I finally believe this woman and her story, we do find out that Selah’s file is sitting on the desk of someone at the goverment level in Bulgaria and they were going to file her away for good because she had two families decline her referral. So…just as I knew from the moment I first saw her face on January 14,2010, God had a plan for Selah to be a Schumaker. After the story of miracle after miracle, we all knew that no matter what, she was made for us and we were made for her! But even after that we were faced with challenge after challenge. We visited her the first time at the end of Aug and didn’t get to go back to get her til April 4th. It was a long and brutal wait, but SO worth it!”
Mom and I were in contact for months, switching dates, etc to make this happen. Mom wanted to have me at the airport when they arrived but again, plans changed and it didn’t work out. But soon after they got her, we did her first ever photo shoot! This was so fun. She kept wanting to hold and look at the camera, her smile was so cute…she’d look up and close her eyes and give you a big grin! This was very new to Selah and she had some complications with her medicine so we were up for a bit of a challenge but as you will see from the photos…LOVE runs very deep with this family and Selah definately fits in perfectly with the boys! The boys were so patient and loving with her and I feel blessed to have been able to capture these memories for them. Mom and Dad are amazing, they have a long road ahead of them with doctor appointments (she’s about 2 yrs behind developmentally) but as you will soon see, their LOVE will conquer it all! So wipe your tears and look at a family who’s love is pouring out!
If you’d like to follow Mom’s blog, and find out more about adoption and Selah’s story, you can do so at www.doingsummersaultsadoption.blogspot.com.
I’m so honored to share their story with you and now Selah is on the website for Adoption with these photos below.
“S” family, I can’t thank you enough for opening up my eyes and ears to your story and I’m so grateful to have your story on my blog, in hopes that someone reaches out and changes another life as you’ve done.
by Vicki Tamburrelli
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