by Marla Hansen

Created on: October 08, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

When we first decided to go forward with adopting a child things were very clear and simple in our minds. We had three great little boys and wanted to add one sweet little baby girl. We talked for days about how incredible it would be to have a daughter to love and raise as our own. This had been a topic of conversation on and off for several years but now it was going to be a reality.

Monday morning I called adoption services in our state. I informed them of our desire to adopt a baby girl. I'm sure I sounded positively giddy. My life would never be the same from that moment on. The social worker took a little information from me and then kindly but firmly let me know we would never be given a baby girl. We already had three children and baby girls rarely went up for adoption anyway. If we were interested in older boys she could help us out today. Of course, these children would be delivered with lots of baggage and not the kind that come in pretty colors. I hung up feeling shell-shocked.

Not one to quickly surrender I began looking into international adoption. Two years later all we had to show for all our efforts were two adoptions that never materialized and a loss of thousands of dollars. A heavy sadness came over me. I loved my husband and my sons with everything in me. I also knew in my heart and had since I was ten that I was going to adopt a little girl someday. As I allowed the sadness to go deep within me it began to bring up those thoughts and feelings from when I was ten. I remembered something! I had wanted to adopt a little girl. She was always Mexican in my mind and her name was Rachel.

That night when I sat down with my husband I told him of my memory. Surely this must be God's way of telling us to go to Mexico and find our baby girl. Bob was tired from the last two years and less than enthusiastic. He wanted to wait a bit before we spent anymore time, money or emotion on the whole adoption thing. The sadness hit me harder than before.

Several weeks later a friend of mine called. She was a birth mother, a foster mother and an adoptive mother. She said she had just come from a meeting and had seen a picture of three little girls the agency was trying to place for adoption. They were sisters, all under six years old and of Mexican descent. She had thought of us immediately and really thought I should call about them. I thanked her but told her there was no way we were going to adopt three older children. I never mentioned it to Bob.

Over the next

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