Reliving The Call

A year ago today, we got The Call that we were going to be S's parents.

It started out like any other day. J and I were getting over a monster cold, and I still had a nasty cough. I attended a mind-numbing meeting that wasn't really relevant to my project at the time, and headed back to my desk. I stopped to talk to our editor, and heard my phone ringing. I figured, "Oh, I'll just check messages when I get done, it's probably no big deal."

I finally wandered back to my office and checked my e-mail. There was one from J that said "Call me. We got matched. It's an emergency".

Eeee! I called J on his cell phone, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Do you want to be a mommy?" I wanted to yell, "Yes!"

He gave me a ton of details, and my boss wandered in to drop something off. I finished up with J and said, "We got matched!" I called our social worker to tell her we were on our way, and she gave me more details. The baby had already been born, her birthmom was firm in her adoption plan, and she had picked our profile. She wanted to meet that afternoon. As people trickled by my office, I got to share the good news. We called our parents.

[Interesting aside: a couple of weeks before this, I'd sent a list of phone numbers for our social worker to call in this situation. I just *knew* that J would be unavailable, so I gave her a long list of numbers to reach me, and a short list of numbers to reach J. Our social worker couldn't get a hold of me that day, but J answered on the first ring. Go figure.]

An hour later I was on my way home. J met me there and we tried to figure out what would be a good gift for S's birthmom and her mom, who was spending time with her in the hospital. We called a local florist and tried to explain that we needed 2 floral bouquets in the next 20 minutes. I asked J to throw all of our collected baby clothes in the wash, because we'd need them soon.

We drove 2 hours to the hospital, and waited as the social worker for S's birthmom made her way through rush-hour traffic to meet up with us. We sat in the parking lot while I called my HR department, and I canceled my weekend waxing appointment (I have priorities, ya know). We headed inside and waited some more. We glanced at the magazines in the hospital lobby.

The social worker finally arrived, and we headed up to the maternity ward. We met the cutest, sweetest, young woman and her mom. We chatted. We talked about S's birth story. We talked about what her birthmom did for a living. We talked about us. We talked about our families. We talked, and talked, and talked.

A nurse brought S in. She looked SO tiny. We asked if we could hold her, and her birthmom said absolutely. She was a light as a feather. The next thing I knew, J was chilling in a hospital chair with a little bundle on his chest.

We overwent our "allotted" chatting time by about a half hour, we were getting along so well. The social worker finally told us that we had to head out so we could sign paperwork at our agency office.

We got in the car and drove over an hour to our office, where our social worker was waiting with a mountain of paperwork. Most of which said that we were now responsible for another human being, and also noting that we could take her home the next day. Around 9pm, we headed home, put the baby clothes in the dryer, and tried to sleep. Because we were in for another really--big--day...