Our Referral Call and the Silver Bullet

 Well, after years of being on the waitlist for a baby girl from Ethiopia, months of being #1 on the waitlist...you often wonder what it will be like to get THE CALL!?!!

 

I remember just where I was when we got Zach's and Ellyana's referral...it is an amazing, wonderful experience!

Most days in the past few months, I had woke up and thought through what it would be like to get our referral that day.  But Monday, March 4, a referral phone call had never crossed my mind.

We were at my parent's house out-of-state for the weekend.  Ellyana had been up around 4:00 AM, so I had been up with her.  My dad was scheduled for open-heart surgery the next week so we had some special time together early in the morning.  I drove him to work.  We were trying to get a lot in that morning because we wanted to head home on Monday instead of Tuesday because of the big snowstorm coming through on Monday night.

We visited my Grandma in the nursing home with cousins.

 We went and ate lunch with my neice at her school.

 We packed up and tried to get headed out as soon as possible to try to beat rush-hour that afternoon.  The day felt like it was playing in fast forward.

After about 2 hours on the road, we got a call on my cell phone.   Our caseworker had a baby girl that she wanted to talk to us about.  WOW!!!!  The only problem...she wants us to be in front of a computer so she can talk through things with us, she wanted to schedule a time to talk!  We still had about 4 more hours till we got home.

Panic!  We made a plan we were going to try to track down a place but unfortunately we were trying to get through an area before rush-hour and then we had to find an place with internet to try to use our IPad in hopes that it would work!?!

We were able to figure out there was a Panera (which was the only place that we knew for sure had Wi-Fi) a few hours down the road, so we planned to talk to our caseworker then. 

And then we went as fast as we could to get there (hoping and praying we wouldn't get a ticket).  We wanted to make every effort to be there at the scheduled time and also to make sure we got the phone call before our caseworker left for the day.  

The mini-van and Brian can really get you there when you need to be ;)

All of a sudden though everyone started to need to go to the bathroom.  We tried to convince ourselves we could make it another hour, but it wasn't working.  We hadn't allowed for time for a bathroom stop before our scheduled call with our caseworker.  We pressed on and then found a rest area (quick, we figured).  We peeled in and then all jumped out of the car as fast as we could.  We raced in and race out (you should have seen the faces of the people at the rest area...really funny!)  I was thinking they either thought we thought the rest area was on fire or had just robbed the place.

On we went and much to our great delight we saw a billboard for Panera 2 minutes ahead.  Yes, this was 40 minutes ahead of our scheduled time to be at the other Panera.  We quickly called our caseworker and asked if she could talk sooner.  She said that was fine and that we should call her when we were settled.

We got off the interstate and ordered dinner.  The kids even got drinks this time (hoping free refills would bide some time for us and we even ordered cookies for dessert).  The kids did not know what was up.  We felt that we didn't want to get their hopes up in case the referral didn't work out.  They should have been suspicious of our unusual behavior (getting pop, cookies and setting them at a table by themselves).  They were just thrilled with all this and felt quite important to be sitting at a separate table.

We were blessed with a little room off the main eating area with no one in it (actually one guy was in it and then saw all of us...and got up and left).  Brian and I took a table and the kids took one nearby.  We were settled enough to call our caseworker.

It was very exciting and actually quite hard to think straight!  The call lasted about 45 minutes and we felt very peaceful.  At the end of the call our caseworker said she would send us pictures, so we hung up and proceeded to check e-mail every few seconds to see if the pictures would come through.  Nothing!

We went to the bathroom, got refills, took pictures at Panera, stalled as long as possible...still no baby pictures.

So figuring it may be a problem with the Ipad not being able to get that big of documents, we eventually had to leave.  We headed for home still hours away.

As disappointing as that moment was, it actually worked out fine. The kids played in the back seat while Brian and I had hours to talk through everything (all without the distraction of her cuteness).  So we talked and thanked the Lord for His goodness, it was very much a blessing.

When we finally got home, the computer could not boot fast enough.  And there she was...precious as could be.  We knew she was ours before we ever saw her face but oh, once we saw it was amazing.  This is the child we have prayed for years, 

this is our daughter and we love her so very much!

The next few days were a whirlwind to get everything official...calls with the International Pediatrician, stacks of paper work, more phone calls, visit to the notary and FedEx, more calls.

On Tuesday evening, we had one more final call and then went to tell the kids the news (actually we had found BJ laying on the floor outside our room listening in...he was quite proud that he had figured things out just then ;)The kids were super excited and we had fun gushing over the pictures with them.

 

Amazingness of timing on this on, Brian's schedule was more free than it has been in months.  And the "call" came before I left for awhile to go back for my dad's surgery.  We were able to get paperwork signed and notarized Wednesday morning.  It was FedEx'd.  

 

 This was the poor lady at our bank who had to notarize our pile of documents...

she actually was pretty happy to be part of the story!

And as of Thursday, March 7 our Referral Acceptance was "official".  Hoorah!!!!!!!!!!

We had great joy telling family and friends and the boys took a little announcement to school.

Ellyana has loved telling the world "I'm going to get a baby sister".  Any random person that talks to her usually gets the announcement. It has been a very fun time!

We thank the Lord for His goodness and for our precious baby girl!

As her name suggests, Symonne...God hears.  And indeed He has!