Yesterday being Cj's second birthday and all, I've been spending a lot of time thinking back over our history together.

I can easily remember the time before Sam had a little sister, and the thought process that brought us to our second adoption. Our adoption journey to her was as special and miraculous as the one we made for Sam, and every step is engraved upon my heart.

There's no having to explain to adoptive parents what we went through during the wait to travel for her. Since we'd been through it before, we were more prepared to deal with the torture of knowing our child was beyond our touch and outside the sphere of safety we would provide, but there was something else that differed from our first adoption to our second.

Shelley.

We met Shelley when in Phnom Penh on our trip for Sam. It was one of those fortuitous introductions that created a link between strangers that grew into a friendship through emails and the telephone.

Shelley, like Gay, is not all that big on kids, but had taken to Sam and enjoyed following his progress through babyhood into toddler time.

When we announced that we were in the process of another adoption ... another adoption from Cambodia ... she was thrilled. Her excitement must have overwhelmed her a bit, because she volunteered to head out to AOA, the orphanage where both my kids were cared for, to check up on our baby girl.

That initial trip turned into an every-weekend commitment. Once a week she would drive out to AOA, get Cj's nanny to report on everything that had happened around our little girl, then cuddle and kiss and speak and sing in English, and generally just love up our baby for a few hours.

Just as importantly, she also took loads of photos and even some videos, then emailed them all to me as soon as she got home from her visits.

Do I need to tell anyone how often I checked my mail on those Saturdays and Sundays? How Mark and I would hover around, waiting for the little 'bing!" that notified me of action in the inbox?

With my old dial-up connection, it would take ages for everything to come through, but OH! when it did!

Thanks to Shelley, we have photos of Cj all through the waiting time ... shots of her awake, asleep, dressed, undressed, wet, powdered, held, getting tummy time, and growing just that little bit bigger every week.

Also thanks to Shelley, Cj wasn't surprised or frightened by our looks and smells and the way we sounded. She knew to feel safe and loved in a version of us she wouldn't have had access to had Shelley not been there.

Cj's 'Goddess Mother', Shelley is forever family, and we are forever grateful for the love she so freely shared with all of us.

For more on our journey to Cj, see past blogs here, and here, and here.