Adoption Story part I

(miles' little hand on day 4)

A little insight and background:

When we started this process we were warned that as a new adoptive couple online we would get lots of "hits" on our profile, and receive some emails. We were also warned that it is common that we will probably get emails from birth mothers and never hear from them again.

And so the story begins:

Back in July we received our first email from a birth mother who was 13-14 weeks along in her pregnancy. Her email was short and nothing promising. Just a question or two. But, it literally took us all day to answer that email. Romney and I sat in our office trying to answer everything perfectly. We sent off our email knowing there was a birth mother interested enough in us to email. We checked our email everyday excited to hear the response but....NOTHING. We decided that we weren't going to get our hopes up and to let it go. A week and a half later we got another email from her. She asked a few questions more. Again we took a whole day answering it. Two weeks went by.... and nothing. We decided to let it go once more. But lo and behold after 3 weeks, we got another email!

After the third email, I called my caseworker to see if we could get a little more detail on who this girl was. When I called our caseworker, she actually had just got off the phone with the the birth mothers caseworker. We were told she was really interested in us and another couple.

It worked out with Romneys work schedule that we could meet this little couple the following week. So we drove 10 hours to meet the girl who could be potential carrying our baby.

We finally made it to our destination with goodies to give and a whole bunch of butterflies swimming in our stomach.

I was so nervous. All who know me, know I have the gift of gab. But not this time. I sat awkward and quiet. Romney did so good doing the talking. I was just so nervous. I just wanted this couple to like me. The face to face meeting lasted a couple of hours and the caseworker chimed in stating it was time to wrap it up and that we could continue to build a relationship through email if that was wanted.

We came home surprisingly feeling calm. A week after our face to face we received another email. They told us that they liked meeting us and felt comfortable talking with us. We started writing emails more frequently, and learned more about each other. On September 27th, we found out that this couple officially had chosen us to adopt their baby. We also found out baby was a boy!

We were so humbled and excited. We wrote back with humility and gratitude accepting their proposal. Daily we checked our inbox awaiting their response. Weeks went by and we hadn't heard anything. I called our caseworker concerned that we hadn't heard from our birth mother in a while, but she calmed all my nerves and had an excuse for everything.

A few days before October 16th, I had a very strong feeling that our birth mother was going to change her mind and our adoption profile would be back online. And on October 16th, we got the phone call from our caseworker telling us that our birth mother had changed her mind. She decided she wanted to parent. The tender mercy was that my mind was ready, and my heart had been prepared.

On the 17th of October our profile was back up online and we had experienced our first failed adoption.