Introducing. . .

Holly Josephine!

Born July 28th, 2010. 8lbs, 14oz. Healthy and gorgeous, with all 10 fingers and toes. And she’s ours!

How it all happened: Today at about 4pm we got a call from our social worker telling us that there was an “instant baby” born yesterday. This means that the birth mother hadn’t contacted the agency until after the baby was born. We agreed to show her our family book, and about two hours later, she’d picked us and we were on our way to the hospital. We meet her birth mom and family and got to hold her. Man, did I mention she’s gorgeous? We don’t get to bring her home until Saturday, but we’ll get to spend all day tomorrow with her at the hospital. We’re very much in shock and so happy!

More later when things have calmed down a bit. As of right now, it’s 2:00 AM and this is how we feel:

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Prune Hands


(photo by SuperFantastic, cc)

Well, this is not a happy post to write. It has officially been one year since we entered the waiting family pool at our agency, and it feels like we are starting to prune up. We knew that it could easily be a year before we were matched with a birthmother, but we were hopeful that it would not take that long.

Unlike our Vietnam disaster, nothing is shutting down. Things are still working, just painfully slowly. Our agency is doing what they know how to do to get all of their families matched, but the fact of the matter is there are not very many birthmothers and there are a lot of waiting families. In the past year we have not seen nearly as many birthmother profiles as we thought we would. Along with a general shortage of women choosing adoption for their child, we have chosen not to show our family book to some women because it just didn’t feel like a good fit for us. We have shown to probably 8 women in the past year, none of whom decided to work with us. And while we are happy for the families that were matched this year, we are feeling pretty blue about the whole situation.

We have not lost hope, we will eventually bring our child home. It is just taking so much longer than we ever imagined it would. We are ready to bring our child home now, but we have not found them yet. Here’s hoping our next blog entry will bring happy news.

Faithful Readers. . .

Or, should I say checkers, as there has been nothing new to read since January. Sorry about that. There just hasn’t been anything to write about since January. I guess you could say that no news is good news, but in our case, it’s just no news. The process is still moving at a snail’s pace and nothing new or interesting has happened in a great while. Keep checking back periodically though, you never know when something might happen!

Any news on the adoption?

This is the question people have been asking us lately.  I think our friends and family are feeling as impatient as we are!  Well, not much is going on, but here’s a quick update for those inquiring minds.

We’ve shown our book to 2 expectant mothers so far, and neither one chose us to parent their child. We were officially “in the pool” in early July, that puts us at about 6 months in right now. So if we are consistent with the agency’s timeline of 3-12 months to be matched, we should find our birth mother within the next 6 months.

We are constantly feeling a strange mix of excitement, anticipation, hope, confusion, and disappointment. What a wild journey this has been so far! We are still feeling optimistic most of the time and are looking forward to meeting our mystery child. We’re also very anxious to know when it will actually happen.

I want to thank all of you who inquire about our progress and have given us support through this whole crazy thing. Here’s to good news in ’09!