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To be in the same room with Isabella is to love her. You just want to drink her up, like she's some kind of magic tonic.

I'll never forget the first time I saw Isabella. It was actually a picture of her, on an adoption website. There were pages and pages of photos of children waiting to be adopted, each one looking blankly at the camera. I was stunned, overwhelmed. But Rhonda, my best friend since the first day of seventh grade, was pointing at one specific little girl saying, "<em>That's</em> going to be our daughter."

Technically, Rhonda didn't know that, yet. She and her husband hadn't begun the adoption process. At the same time, though, they just <em>knew</em>. I stared at the photo. There was no denying Isabella's most-adorable status, but how can you look at a tiny head-shot on a website and know a child is meant for you?

On June 18, 2007, Rhonda and Frank held Isabella for the first time, in Changsha, China.

Like I said (and you can see), Isabella is adorable, even in an straight-up orphanage photo. But to be in the same room with her is something nearly impossible to describe. She has the kind of curiosity and determination—an openness and love for life—that we all hunger for. She doesn't just display it. She radiates it. You want to cuddle her right up, in hopes that some of whatever she has will rub off on you.

Isabella was born with spina bifida and another rare birth defect that prevented her right arm and leg from developing properly. It's impossible to talk about her without mentioning this, because a huge part of what makes her captivating is her attitude toward her disabilities, and the many ways she overcomes them. There isn't an ounce of self-pity in her. Trust me, it's not just because she's too little to realize what she's missing. She's almost four and as smart as a whip. Isabella can see that her brother Marcus and the other children at her preschool are all running around vertically, while she scoots from place to place with one "good" arm and leg, and gets pulled around in a wagon. She just has a very special spirit, that refuses to be dampened—not by the scooting, not by the four months she spent in a body cast after her hip surgery, not by her leg amputation or seven other hospital stays she's had in the past year. Not by anything.

And today, everything will change—at least physically. Today is the day Isabella gets a new leg. Rhonda told me yesterday, when she called to catch up, that Isabella refers to it as her "robot leg," since "prosthetic" is such a difficult word. If you ask Isabella what's going to happen today, she says, matter-of-factly, "I'll get my robot leg. Then I'll stand up and have fun."

Having fun is at the top of Isabella's priority list. She's a kid. Of course she can't wait. For Rhonda, getting the prosthetic is first going to invoke "buckets of tears," she told me. "It's just a very big day. It represents so much. Being vertical and able to walk is a freedom most of us take for granted. It's really going to open up her world."

This day also reminds Rhonda and Frank—and all of us who love Isabella—what her fate might have been had she not been adopted by a family who could afford the surgeries, in a country where they could be performed. Isabella was born in Hunan Province, one of the poorest in China. It's not just that she never would have walked there. Rhonda told me there is no care for disabled adults; at 16, Isabella would have been put out on the street, without even a wheelchair to help her along.

Instead, she's getting her $7,000 prosthetic leg—a very basic one for starters, with no flex in the ankle and only manually locked positions in the knee. She's also getting a very special $700 sock, which Rhonda tried to describe to me, but I couldn't quite get. And then Isabella will learn to walk. I know these eyes won't be dry when I see it.

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