I love this photo of my husband, Tim with our youngest child, Talley. This is from our first trip to Haiti. In fact, it was taken on Talley’s first birthday … on July 13, 2006.

Before we started our journey to adopt from Haiti, I had begged Tim for months to adopt a newborn baby. He semi-agreed at one point, but a few weeks later admitted that he was seriously regretting his agreement. He felt like he was done with babies and never wanted another child under the age of three.

Eventually he agreed to adopt Georgia, and though she was two when we accepted her referral, we knew that she would be at least three and a half or four years old before she came home. I felt a bit sad about never having another baby in our home. As you may know from reading various posts here, we soon decided to add a child to our paperwork, and chose to adopt a baby girl. We lost our first baby, Ruth, but immediately accepted the referral for Talley. At the time she was almost eleven months old. Knowing how old she would be when she came home (around two years old), Tim was fine with her age.

When we got to Haiti, we realized that even though Talley was one year old, she was still very babyish. She was very small and could not really crawl. Size-wise she was wearing six month clothing. Developmentally, she seemed more like a nine month old. She was very much a little baby. I was worried that Tim would regret our decision to adopt her; or worse, that he would resent having added her to our family.

I didn’t have anything to worry about, as you can see from the picture above. Talley grabbed hold of her daddy’s heart and didn’t let go. I think she has him under a spell! ;-)