The Big Finish

Today our journey to become a family ends. Now it becomes a different sort of story, but probably not one any more unique or exciting than any other family's story. Even at their worst, the last five months have been better than I ever could have imagined. I love coming home to my daughter's smiles, and had no idea how great it could be to be a father. A lot of our friends have warned me not to wish Riley's youth away waiting for her to hit new milestones, but that hasn't really been a problem for me. I'm not waiting for her to crawl, or walk, or talk - I'm just enjoying watching her grow and explore the world around her. We're really fortunate to have her.

I suspect this will be our last post, so I'll wrap up the last 4 months since our last post.

• Riley's birthparent rights were officially terminated by the court in November.
• After a 30-day waiting period, we were able to schedule a finalization hearing for today.
• We've been counting down the days for the last week, but the actual finalization hearing was fairly anti-climatic, being handled as a phone conference that lasted less than 10 minutes. While the judge commended us for what we are doing, my favorite part of the hearing was when he asked us if we were Kentucky Wildcat fans and cautioned us that our answer was very important. When I spoke up and said "Absolutely not," the judge replied, "Good answer. Petition approved!"

And that's pretty much it. We celebrated with sushi at one of our favorite places here in town, then came home to give our little girl a bath and put her to bed. What a way to end a journey that we've been on for the last year and a half...

Travel Clearance

Epilogue 1:
Carrie and I spent nearly 2 weeks between the hospital and a condo waiting for clearance to travel home. We don't expect to blog much more, since this wraps up the story of our journey, but we wanted to fill in some dates:

• August 27th - Riley Beth discharged from the hospital
• September 1st - Received ICPC clearance to travel home
• September 2nd - Arrived home in Kentucky!

Barring any surprises in the process, the next entry will be our last, when we can announce that the adoption is final.

Lighter Hearts Than Last Night

Good news! We didn't have to wait until Friday after all. The birthmother was discharged today and both birthparents signed the paperwork to terminate their parental rights. For the first time in several days, we can both breathe easier. Our journey is a LONG WAY from over, but this is one of those milestones we didn't know if we'd ever see, and it's really here.

Another Week = Another Roller Coaster Ride

Dateline 8/18/2010 - In 2.5 hours, my daughter will be 1 day old, and I'm scared because Carrie and I can't be there with her. Her birthmother has asked us to give her the night with her baby and her husband to find closure. I'm only hoping that closure is really closure, and not a change of heart.



How did we get here? Two weeks ago, we got the first in a series of life-changing calls. A week ago, despite our social worker's advice, Carrie and I came to Orlando to be with our birthmother as she prepared to go into labor (or so she thought). Last Thursday, she came to our hotel, brought us sonogram pictures, and did everything she could to alleviate our fears. Throughout the hospital tour, all of her questions were about things the hospital would do to guarantee our access during labor and delivery, almost to the point of being pushy. We loved her for it! After dinner and a walk around the mall where we were able to really get acquainted with each other, we parted company until the next day. On Friday, the "belly mom" decided she actually wanted to take castor oil to speed the process along. She assured us that she'd done this with her other kids, and since Riley (our daughter) was already 37 weeks along, there wouldn't be any negative effects. I guess it just wasn't meant to be, as the 4oz. bottle of castor oil had no affect at all, other than to make her sick to her stomach.



The next day, we got a call to meet "belly mom" at the hospital, but in less than an hour, Triage determined that her contractions and discomfort were due to dehydration. We left the hospital disappointed and decided that Saturday and Sunday nights would be a good time for Carrie and me to explore the sights of Orlando without going crazy financially. Fortunately Downtown Disney and Universal's Citywalk were ready for us. Who knew the Pat O'Brien's in Orlando would look like an exact replica of the one in the French Quarter? I avoided the Hurricane, but fried shrimp, crawfish and catfish in front of the dueling copper-topped pianos made me feel strangely at home for a couple of hours. We also know that we're NEVER going to submit Riley to this in the heat of August, and that there's really not much at either one for kids to enjoy.



By Monday, we were driving to an FBI fingerprint appointment, trying to get information about "belly mom's" Doctors' appointment, and trying to plan whether we would go home or not. When we were told they would induce this week but needed to call her back with a date, we figured we'd end up staying for the induction. When Monday afternoon stretched into Tuesday afternoon and inducing this week turned into inducing next Thursday, we knew we had to pack up the car, go home for a week and come back fresh and ready. Boy were we ever wrong!



You know how they say life is what happens when you're busy making plans? We found out firsthand what that meant. Within the first hour, we'd already called both of our bosses, made plans to work on the nursery, made an appointment to update our home study with Brenda, and thought about the other chores that need done (getting the downed tree in our backyard chopped up and hauled away, getting our garage door fixed, and getting our air conditioning repaired). 5 hours and 350 miles north of Orlando, I was trying to decide when to turn the wheel over to Carrie when the phone rang. Carrie was occupied on the phone, but I knew what she meant as soon as she pointed me to the next off-ramp. We had already joked with my Mom that we would get a call to come back just as soon as we got home to Lexington. We got the call, but fortunately it didn't come that late. From that point on, we were in a mad dash back to Orlando. I didn't even want to stop long enough for Carrie to change into clean clothes and do her makeup, but our near-empty gas tank solved that problem for her. We saw a rainbow right away, but that turned into rain and lightning, which turned into a blocked left lane after someone else had an accident. We had no idea if we'd make it in time, and e-mails with the "belly mom" didn't do much to assure us.



What can I say? We made it, and the whole thing still feels like a dream. Within a half hour after we made it to the hospital, the doctor had broken her water, and ten minutes later, we had a beautiful 5lb 11oz baby girl in our arms. Her Grandaddy Gene (who was unfortunately recovering from an unscheduled surgery in another hospital back in Virginia) had been saying all along that she would be born on August the 18th, but Riley Beth showed how stubborn she's going to be, instead making sure to pop out 4 minutes before midnight just to prove him wrong. I got to cut the cord, but when they told me it would be tough, I had no idea it would take me 6 or 7 tries to get all the way through it! I think they gave me the dull scissors, and Carrie says she thought I'd never finish. After the obligatory counting of the fingers and toes and the remarks about her full head of black hair, we (Carrie, me, "belly mom" and the maternal grandmother) passed Riley around for another hour until they took us up to Recovery. We spent a great night learning to hold and feed her, talking to the "belly mom" about her hopes, and ignoring our bodies' need for sleep. Carrie never did lay down, and I only slept for an hour around 6am.



But now we're back to the present, and it's less than an hour until she's one day old. Carrie is asleep, and I hope Riley and her birth parents are getting some rest also. I'm going on 2 hours of sleep in the last 38 hours, but I'm too full of emotions - hopes and fears both - to be ready to sleep. Our friends, many of whom we've kept this whole thing from hoping to wait to tell them until after the parents have terminated their rights, have read between enough lines on Facebook statuses that I couldn't hold off telling them any more. And the best comfort I can find - other than our social workers' assurances that we're doing everything the best way we possibly can - is to tell myself that this is our story I'm writing. This is OUR journey to become a family, not the footnote in someone else's story.



I hope I'm right. We should know in another 36 hours...

"Ready! Set! Go!" only without the "Ready! Set!"

It's pretty crazy how life can turn around:

• 3 weeks ago, I had given up on anything happening this year, so much so that I decided I could try out for a show in Versailles (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) without worrying about schedule conflicts. I didn't get the part.


• 2 weeks ago, I took a spontaneous, last-minute roadtrip to Chicago with a good friend and fraternity brother. We saw a GREAT concert with Kid Rock and Bon Jovi at Soldier Field on Saturday night, then grabbed a deep dish Chicago-style pizza at Gino's East before heading back to Kentucky. While we were waiting for our pie, the conversation turned to adoption. I told Mike that I had pretty much given up on anything happening this year, even though there was still almost half a year left. He and I had a long philosophical discussion about the legality and ethics of Chinese adoptions, ate our pizza, and hit the road.


• 1 week ago I was on the road to Harrisburg PA, site of this year's Phi Sigma Pi convention, when the phone rang and everything changed.

Kelli, our social worker with American Adoptions, called and explained that there was a situation in Florida. A birthmother outside of Orlando was already matched with another family, but that family was not going to be able to travel for the birth. I feel really sorry for the other family's loss, but Kelli asked if they could show our profile in order to salvage the situation and assure the birthmother that she was making a good decision. To make matters more stressful, they were meeting with the birthmother in less than 30 minutes, so we needed to make a quick decision. Carrie surprised me less than an hour later when she called me and told me to pull over to the side of the road because we were now in a match and she didn't want me to wreck! Ten minutes later, we were on the phone with the birthmother and her social worker.

I'm going to respect the "belly mom's" privacy (her term, not ours) and not use her name, but I can say that Carrie and I couldn't have asked for a nicer, more open person to go into this situation with. She's communicated with us by phone and e-mail ever since Thursday, offering advice on where to find a crib and what rewards clubs to sign up for, telling us that she really feels like she's made the right decision in helping us become a family, and assuring us that the baby in her belly is our daughter Riley Beth! She seems like the kind of person that we both would love to maintain contact with as our daughter grows up so that she can know the complete story.

A lot can still go wrong, which is why Carrie and I haven't made a bunch of public announcements or said anything to most of our friends. But as I write this on August 11th, we've finished a 13-hour drive from Kentucky, Carrie is sleeping and I'm getting ready to crawl into a third hotel bed in as many weeks. We're preparing to meet our birthmother tomorrow morning in Orlando, and if all goes well, we'll be parents by the weekend.

Look out world, here she comes! Zero-to-60 in a week's time...

Still Waiting...

I just realized today that if our child hasn't been conceived yet, we will not have a baby this year.

So daily I pray...Lord please be with our birth mother. Surround her with people who love and support her decision to make an adoption plan. Keep her healthy. Keep her strong. Give her the peace of mind that she is making the right choice.

The light isn't always just at the end of the tunnel.

If you're keeping score along with my wife, it's now been 13 weeks since we were activated with American Adoptions. As you can probably tell from her last post, Carrie is almost literally climbing the walls in anticipation. It's easy for me to know - not think, not believe, but KNOW - that things will happen for us exactly when they're meant to happen, and not a moment earlier. But just like I read in "The Brotherhood of Joseph", it's a whole lot harder to convince Carrie of that.

Fortunately for us, we have our adoptive family specialist, Kelli. The first thing you have to understand is how our profile gets in the hands of prospective birthmothers. When a birthmother contacts the agency, they counsel her about her decision, take down her information, and then send her up to 20 possible matches based on her preferences and how they fit our APQ (Adoptive Parent Questionnaire). So, before we can ever make a match with birthparents, our profile has to match what they're looking for enough to have been sent out. That's where Kelli was able to help us by illuminating our exposure over the last 3 months. Kelli conferenced both of us in Tuesday afternoon and gave us a good pep talk. I know it made me feel better than I already had been, and I hope it helped Carrie make through a few more weeks.

Without going into too many details because they don't want you to focus just on "The Number", Kelli explained to us that our exposure had been very good over the last three months, all things considered. She explained that their expected average is 10 exposures per month - 10 times that an adoptive families profile will be sent out to potential birthparents. She said that our exposure had been below average, but on the high end of the range, so I'm guessing we've averaged somewhere between 7 and 10 exposures per month. That's great, though, because we've got some strikes against us. First off, due to Kentucky laws about licensing and facilitation, American Adoptions can only show our profile in the seven states where they're licensed. Secondly, we've known all along that even though our budget is a lot of money to us, it's on the low end of the scale. What it comes down to is that even though we can only be shown in 7 states and our budget is low, our openness in terms of race and medical background is overcoming our drawbacks. Kelli also mentioned that they had received some good feedback from some of the times when our profile had been sent out.

So...we're still waiting, but at least there's been a little bit of light to keep us going.