As anyone who reads my occasional blog posts here knows, Jackie and I started this year with the misfortune of a second miscarriage, and the decision to move forward with adding to our family through adoption. I wrote several posts throughout the year on our process of getting approved and on a waiting list, to waiting, to meeting our birthmother, and our ongoing relationship with her, including the false alarm in mid-November. Well, since that date, I was convinced that our birthmother would go into labor two weeks ago today, December 13th, as I was subpoenaed to testify in court that day, and it would a course happen when I was on the stand.
I was close to being right. Two weeks ago, my testifying went off without any issues. I left the court, finished some work at the office, and headed home a little early because we had planned to call our birthmother that night, possibly to see if she wanted us to visit again that weekend. Right at 5pm, just as we were sitting down to call her, Jackie's phone went off, and our birthmother was calling us. She was at the hospital, they had told her that there was some issues with the baby, and that they were going to run some more tests but they might be inducing her (at 37 weeks), due to those issues. (Later, we learned what those issues were - our birthmother had failed her non-stress test; and her biophysical score, which is out of 10 and should at least be a 6 I guess, was a 2 - simply put, on the ultrasound, the baby wasn't moving and they could not pick up that the baby was breathing). She was, naturally, very upset and needed us to come right away. We immediately jumped in our Kia and started the 4 hour drive south to the hospital (which we made in just under 3 hours and 30 minutes).
The entire drive down, I was still convincing myself that it wasn't really going happen; I was preparing myself that we would journey down, and they would find out that everything was still okay, and not induce because she still was three weeks away from her due date; I was preparing myself for having to have that long drive back the same night. Well, soon as we pulled onto the street about a half mile away from the hospital, our birthmother called again to check to see how close we were, and to let us know that the doctors had confirmed that would begin inducing her within an hour or so.
This was actually happening. We rushed inside the hospital, found our way to the maternity ward (being grateful that our agency was on the ball and had all the paperwork to the hospital already so they had an idea of who we were and why we were there), found our birthmother's room and joined her. They did induce her that night (Thursday). We waited and stayed with our birthmom, along with a friend of hers, throughout the night and into the next morning, as things slowly moved forward.
We waited.
Then, before noon on Friday, things started to speed up, and I was out of the room as we got closer and closer to the actual birth (though Jackie did stay in for the entire time). I am outside the room, standing in the hallway of a very quiet maternity ward. Just waiting. Its not just past noon, and I can hear the distinct noise of a baby crying. I look over at the hallway clock; Maia Grace Nicole entered this world at 12:06 p.m. on December 14th, 2012.
Our journey to finally have a child of our own had started close to six years prior to this date; it was a long dream finally realized. We were overjoyed.
Little did we know at that time that our daughter would make us wait a little bit longer before coming home.
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| Already screaming! :) Her first pic, showing her weight, 5 pounds, 14 ounces. |
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