April writes:

We are pleased and excited for you all to meet our newest addition…our miracle boy.

Meet Benjamin!

                                 (Marcus was Benjamin’s advocacy name.)

Benjamin was born on April 15, 2012, in Zhengzhou City, China.  He and his new little brother, Silas, will share a birthday!  How wonderful is that?!!

He was abandoned the same day in the lobby of the hospital of his birth.  We have expressed in the past that we will never know for sure why some of our children were abandoned.  Faith’s and Silas’s stories are especially perplexing.  Faith was kept by her birth family for two months before being left at the emergency room of the local hospital.  Silas seems to have been born with fairly mild special needs…most likely, prematurity and an umbilical hernia.  We are fairly confident though that Hope’s birth family had to give her up due to her being born with Spina bifida.  That defect would have been very obvious at the moment of birth, and the surgery quite expensive.  We are certain that it was a most loving choice that her birth family made for her.

We have chosen, for now, to keep most of Benjamin’s special needs private.  The reason is that our mindset has changed since we first entered the world of adoption.  We now feel quite strongly that his special needs pertain to his personal medical history.  And that history should be *his* to share…not ours.  We can say that he has six special medical needs…any one of which would be difficult, even if it were the only one he had.  But our little boy has six special needs.  The most critical of which, is that he was born with a single kidney.  And that kidney is failing.  He has been diagnosed with Stage 3 kidney disease, and it is slowly killing him.  We have been advised that he has a 1 1/2 to 2 years at most to live, if allowed to continue to reside in the country of his birth.  For that reason alone, we are trying desperately to medically expedite his adoption.  We are praying that all of Benjamin’s paperwork will catch up to Silas’s and that Rick can still travel to China by the end of this calendar year.  We covet your prayers for our precious boys!

Benjamin’s caregivers report that he likes to play with other children, but that he does not like to talk.  (We’re positive Faith will be more than willing to do his share of the talking!)  He can say “ma ma”, “jie jie” (sister), and “ayi” (nanny).  He can understand what the nannies say to him and can communicate with them.  He can wave goodbye and clap his hands.  He can grab toys and pass them from one hand to the other and grasp pens.  They say that he is a very intelligent child.  His diet consists of three cups of rice a day, with two supplemental “meals” of bread and cookies.  He has a good appetite and is not picky.  (Which I guess is a good thing, since he only gets rice, bread, and cookies!  Poor kid!!)

His developmental report ends with this final statement.  “Zheng Lian Min is a great child and we all really like him.  We hope that he can quickly find a loving home and a father and mother that will give him a happy childhood and a beautiful future.  We are confident that he will bring bundles of joy and good fortune to your home.”  Oh precious boy.  Though we did not find you very “quickly”, we found you in God’s perfect timing.  And how we long to be your father and mother!  But we want Benjamin to know this…there is a Father that will give you an even better hope and future than we can provide.  We can’t wait to tell you all about Him.  And how obvious it is, just through the story of us being permitted to adopt you, how very much He loves you already.  He has given us a most wonderful gift…a precious bundle of joy that blesses us immensely just by being OURS!