I woke up very early this morning from a vivid dream. In it, I was giving my children baths in a beautiful, clear stream in the woods. We were floating peacefully up and down the current. Then I saw another child sitting in the stream, with its head turned so that I couldn’t see it clearly. But I thought that it was a child with Down syndrome. It seemed like forever before that child turned its head and I saw that it was a little girl, blond hair, and just as I thought, with DS. I knew she had been abandoned.
I felt an eagerness, a longing to bring that child into my home and into my heart—a longing that was almost pain. I gathered her into my lap alongside Julianna, and she drifted up and down the waterway with us, but the peace had been replaced by an intense joy, as well as some fierce problem-solving, trying to work out how I could manage to foster this child.
Then I woke up, but the rest of the night I drifted in and out of uneasy sleep, watching the drama of this child unfold until I heard Christian moving around upstairs, and knew that it was time to get up for good.
