Another call

We've been holding out on you, people. There's a Part 2 to that last post. Only two hours after we heard about the Las Vegas mom, my phone rang again. This time it was our adoption counselor with a different "situation." And this time, we were very, very interested.

Let me just pause here and say, getting two calls in one day is very, very uncommon. I have a theory about this. I think God knew that without this second call (only hours after the first), we may have been tempted to pursue the Las Vegas situation. Even though there were some factors that clearly made us uncomfortable. Having that second call in the same day snapped me out of the baby reverie and made me slow down and look at everything (a tiny bit) more objectively.

Anyway, back to this birth mom. She's 19, lives 50 minutes away, and is due June 27th. Oh. And she wants eight visits a year after the baby is born.

Eight! Our counselor told us there are very few adoptive families open to this much open-ness, so she was calling to "screen" us to see if we would even be interested in this situation. We said we'd be open to four.

I'm going to condense a 19-day drama into a few short sentences. We met with the birth mom twice over the course of two weeks. We had the chance to meet her boyfriend and mother. We spent six hours with her; laughing about old photographs, trading pet stories, talking about the baby, and getting to know one another. We had an instant connection with the birth mom and she repeatedly told her counselor how much both she and her mom liked us.

But. We knew that she was also spending time with two other couples. (We felt like we were on a non-trashy version of the Bachelor. We even had the "meet-the-family" date! Thank goodness there was no overnight date. That would've been awkward. )

This Monday we found out that she has decided to choose between the other two couples. They are both open to 8 visits a year.

Jonathan and I are sad, because we knew so much about this little one already. He's a boy, due June 27th. He already likes to suck his thumb and he kicks his mom when she's laying down to go to sleep. I was starting to picture myself wearing a little baby to the Maple Grove farmer's market every Thursday this summer. Or, road-tripping to my parents' place on Lake Superior with my THREE favorite boys.

With that said, we are really and truly okay. Not just pretending-to-be-okay-so-people-don't-stare-or-send-casseroles, but honestly okay. We both feel that we wouldn't change a thing, even if we could go back. Logistically, we thought 8 visits a year would have been nearly impossible to follow through with. The last thing we wanted to do was promise something we couldn't deliver. This baby was not our baby, but I know that our little one is out there. We will be ready when our baby finds us!