Next Steps

I'm sure this won't come as a surprise, but I didn't get much sleep last night.  Between my brain running a hundred miles a minute thinking about having a new baby in just over 4 months and fighting a nasty cold, I think I maybe got 4 hours of good sleep last night.  But it's a new day and my first day knowing that I'm going to be a mom very soon.  Such a blessing!  It was great to add a prayer for our Birth Mother and Baby to my morning prayers this morning.  :)

Today we send in the authorization for the next two payments.  We are beyond blessed to have had this money set aside for the last year and have this not be a stress on us at all.  It's making this whole process so much more enjoyable for us.  Once the payment is processed we will hopefully get on a conference call with the BM in the next few days and then after that we will see where this goes.

We are trying very hard to wait until after the call with the BM before we tell anyone outside of our immediate families, but I know that is going to be very difficult for both of us.  We have so many family members, co-workers, CRHP brothers and sisters, and friends that have been praying for us and we cannot wait to share our big news with all of them.  But we've learned a lot of patience over this last year and know that we can hold off for a few more days.

The Call

Yesterday was the day we finally got the call!!  It was a pretty quiet evening for us, which is very rare for us.  I was supposed to have a CRHP meeting that night but it got cancelled due to illness, so we were both at home for the night with nothing to do.  I was able to leave work on time, so I had made dinner and we were waiting for the oven to finish preheating so it could cook.  My phone rang at 6:02pm, which is generally not normal anymore, and I was saying "I wonder who is calling me" as I walked over the couch where my phone was sitting and I saw ANLC on my caller ID.  My first thought was "could it be" but then quickly went to the fact that we hadn't talked to our liason in a couple of months, so I figured it was her calling.  When I answered there was a different voice on the phone and before I knew it she was telling me that a birth mother had picked us!  Trent was sitting on the armchair in the family room, so I quickly put the phone on speaker and asked her to repeat herself.  Thankfully she said the same thing...a birth mother picked us!!  We were both oddly quiet and unemotional for the majority of the call (there were a few hugs throughout and lots of smiles).  Trisha (our adoption consultant) walked through all of the birth mother's information with us and ended with explaining that we had until Noon on Tuesday to accept.  As she was talking I quickly muted the phone and Trent and I both agreed that we had nothing to discuss and that we would be accepting this adoption opportunity.  Trisha was thrilled for us and talked us through the next steps, which would include our next payment and then a conference call with the BM.

The rest of our evening was spent calling our parents and siblings to share the great news.  Oddly, I found myself getting more emotional hearing their reactions than from hearing the news myself.  It took a little extra time to find my parents to tell them as they were in a meeting, but we were finally able to get a hold of them later in the evening and share the news with them.

Going to bed that night we agreed that we both felt very calm about the whole situation.  I'm sure the anxiety will kick in once it settles in and gets more real, but day 1 was mostly calm for us, which I attribute to being more than ready to hear this news.  We've waited over a year to get that call and I know that we are more than ready to be parents.  And God has rewarded our patience and constant prayers.