Two months later....

Wow. Blog fail. I know a lot of you have been checking back for an update...let's just say we've been busy. Busy looking at this sweet face:

So, to back up a few months (yikes!)...

Baby girl was due around March 31, but we decided to fly down to Florida a few days before the due date to make sure we were around in time. Also, the end of March is SPRING BREAK WOOHOO season in Palm Beach, which means it is nearly impossible to make last minute hotel reservations. So we reserved our hotel for almost a month, just in case baby stuck around in the womb for a while. We figured we could spend some time at the beach, pretending to relax.

Our birth mom thought we were crazy. She insisted the baby was going to be a week overdue and that we shouldn't come down so soon. We struggled to love on her as she was pulling away from us and trying to cope with what was coming. I cried for about a week straight. I pretended I was excited that the baby was coming soon, but really I was terrified that we would have to come home with an empty car seat and no baby. We prayed, packed our bags, and left. We just couldn't stay in Kansas anymore.

So, we landed in Florida a little before midnight on March 26. When we got to the hotel, I turned on my phone, only to find these messages: "Baby is coming NOW!" "Where are you????" "Are you in Florida yet?"

I was tired. I was stressed. I checked my voice mail again. I reread the texts. They were real.

So I called our birth mom. "She's already here." She told me. The labor was quick, no time for medication. She asked if we could wait to come to the hospital in the morning, so she and the birth father could spend the night with their sweet little girl. Of course, we obliged. I laid in bed the entire night wide awake, looking at pictures on my phone of the baby.

In the morning, we called our parents and brothers and told them the baby was here. We didn't share a name or make a big announcement. She wasn't ours yet.

We finally got to meet the little one a little before lunch. The hospital was wonderful and let us have our own private room. We wheeled the baby between our room and our birth mom's room, each getting a chance to spend time alone with her.

Here was our sweet little girl! But was she really going to be ours? Would our birth mom change her mind? When could we finally tell people she was here???

Our birth mom stayed firm in her decision to place her little girl with us. We got to meet some of her family, who were so nice and supportive of us. She officially signed away her parental rights the next day. Seeing her and the birth father that day was hard. They love that little girl so much and were so broken to have to leave without her. We were excited that the adoption was going forward, but our hearts were so heavy for them.

What followed next was a complete whirlwind of signing papers, taking pictures, signing more papers, getting the baby ready to leave, and finally announcing to the world that we were taking our little BEATRICE BABY home! (or at least to the hotel..)

 

At this point we had to wait for our ICPC (Interstate Contract for Placement of Children) papers to be approved by the state of Florida, then the state of Kansas. Without this approval, we couldn't leave the state of Florida. We knew this could take a couple of weeks, but we had high hopes that we could be flying home soon. Our hopes were quickly dashed. Our papers weren't filed as quickly as we would have liked. Many of them had to be redone because of policy changes. The process was slow. It was stressful. At the beginning, we were cherishing the time we got to spend alone in the hotel with our new baby, bonding with her. At the end, we were going crazy. Here was our home away from home (Jeremy insisted we take the picture with our mess included):

Can you find the baby??

 

After two and a half weeks, on a Friday, our attorney called and said there was no way were going home until sometime the next week. I cried. Another weekend? How many episodes of Full House can one person watch before losing their mind? Maybe ten minutes later, our attorney called again. We were cleared to go home. I cried. 

We booked the earliest flight we could and got outta there!

  

 

So what's next? Our birth parents can no longer change their minds. Their parental rights are terminated. Our attorney is Beatrice's legal guardian. I don't know what the legal term is for us right now. Her loving momma and daddy? We are required to have three follow-up visits in our home with our social worker (one is done, the second is tomorrow). After that, we wait for our court date to be set and for finalization! We are hoping for finalization to happen by the end of the year, but we have no way of knowing. 

In the meantime, we've enjoyed 2 months of this:

 Praise God!!

Florida and Winter's Wrath

It surely has been quite a while since our last update. To be completely honest, we didn't have much to write about. The nursery has been finished for some time, our paperwork was in order: in other words, there wasn't much to tell. This last weekend, however, was quite the doozy!

After some discussion with our lawyer, we decided to visit our birth mother in Florida. We were to fly out last Thursday, February 21st at about 6:00 pm. I'm sure many of you know that's when Mother Nature decided to work a little black (or should I say "white") magic. Our flight was canceled before lunchtime on Wednesday. We were re-booked for 6:20 am on Friday, February 22nd. Now 12 inches of snow can do crazy things, including canceling flights for a second time. As it turns out, all flights after 7:00 am on Friday were on time. We were just 40 minutes too early. Harumph!

We finally got out at 12:30 pm on Saturday. Our hotel was very gracious and allowed us to change check-in dates and credit card numbers (that's a story for a later date) without issue. The only problem, cheap hotels are cheap. We didn't sleep a wink that first night. I bet your thinking, "Jeremy, I'm sure it was your nerves at meeting your birth mother," or "Jeremy, it was probably the Denny's you had for dinner that night." I'm here to tell you that's nonsense. The room was just that bad. In fact, I was looking for another hotel at 2:30 am because neither of us was getting any sleep. We didn't get checked out until 9:00 am, little worse for wear except for extreme sleep deprivation. Needless to say we found a much better hotel.

Regardless of these petty issues, God displayed his providential will in our meeting with our birth mother. Ashley and I met her at a Cheesecake Factory with our attorney and her social worker. We felt compelled to tell her our how strongly we believed in keeping her in both her child's and our lives. We also learned a lot about our birth mother. I cannot imagine how it would have gone better.

Later we arrived at the much nicer hotel and discovered that a second storm was hitting Kansas City Monday night, causing our flight home to be canceled. Thankfully, we re-booked that bad boy to earlier in the day. Sneaked in just before the snow started to fall.

Thinking back on the weekend, it seemed almost like a movie script, something out of "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" perhaps. I found myself laughing often: the situation was just too silly. I also saw the ocean for the first time. So there's that.