Ten years ago today, I became the mother of a little girl. I felt a soul halfway around the world calling to me and my soul answered. 
It took a year. I filled out mountains of paperwork, put my family through criminal background checks and social services interviews.
I woke up at 3 AM night after night, believing in my heart a child out there was meant to be ours. I prayed she would stay safe and healthy and I promised her every night that I was coming.
We already had 6 kids - his, hers and ours. The youngest was 7 and my husband could finally see the light at the end of this long tunnel.
When I went to him and said "There's a little soul calling to me and God wants us to go to China and get her," he listened, he believed, and the only thing he asked was that we not start all over with a baby. "Can we adopt a 4 or 5 year old, someone for our son to grow up with?"
I remember the night before we met her. Great Wall Adoptions sent us a picture and a one paragraph description of the 4 1/2 year old girl from Hainan chosen for us by Chinese government officials. I had a meltdown in our hotel room in Beijing that night.
"What if there's something wrong with her?" I sobbed. "What if she's like some of those kids from orphanages in Romania?"
My husband put his arms around me.
"If you really believe that God led us here, do you think He will abandon us now?" He put headphones on me and played a Phil Collins song f
rom the Tarzan soundtrack
Somewhere, someone is calling for me
Two worlds, one family
Trust your heart, let fate decide
To guide these lives we see
The next day, all our lives changed forever and the family we were meant to have was finally complete.
We met a little girl who was always hungry, relentlessly cheerful, a little feisty, occasionally stubborn - and the bravest person I've ever known.
She put her hand into the hand of our son and followed us, dragging her new little suitcase behind her, turned her back on the only world she had ever known and trusted in the kindness of these big-nosed strangers from a strange land.
That first year she thought American was a great place when she discovered we had a holiday where you could knock on people's doors and they GAVE YOU CANDY! She had never celebrated a birthday or Christmas, never had anything that was hers alone.
For months, every night before bed she put all her things back in her little suitcase and lined up her new shoes carefully at the foot of her bed. When we checked on the kids late at night, we would find her sleeping on the tile floor because she wasn't used to a soft bed.
Today, Danielle Heather Bao Shuang Wheeler is a high school freshman enrolled in the Early College program. She's a typical American teenager, wearing torn jeans and purple toenail polish, cellphone glued to her ear, IPod around her neck,
bound to her peers by invisible wireless chains.
Dani is my live-in Internet specialist, the one who taught me how to design the graphs on my market reports and reads the manual when we get a new tech device.
She has a tender heart for stray kittens,misses her big brother who is away at college now, but enjoys being an only child, getting all the attention for the first time in her life.
Dani was the star of the very first featured post I ever had on Activerain - The Biggest Sale I Ever Made.
She's touched the hearts of so many of my clients and already changed the life of another little girl forever.
HAPPY DANI DAY!
Love,
Mom
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