Game, Set, Match!

Again, I apologize for the spotty update, but this time I have a little more to report. Before I get into the update, I do want to report that I did see Juno and I actually really enjoyed it. There are some really ridic adoption scenarios in the movie but it was a very entertaining movie. And when I say ridic, i mean scenarios that would just never happen in a real adoption process. Put some of the fiction aside, there are some hilarious scenes and a coupla scenes that actually made me think they modeled some of it after us:-) Karen hasn't seen it yet, I told her to wait to watch it after our process is over so we can watch the whole thing through and be able to laugh about it. So with that in mind, I am going to delay my critique of the movie for a coupla months.

So back to the latest report! We are matched!!! What that means is we have come to an agreement with a birth mother to make an adoption plan for her daughter with us! I did say 'daughter' and I did say 'with us'! So before I go into some of the details, I do want to say that as we are excited, we are also very cautiously optimistic. Even though everybody is in full agreement with the adoption plan, we understand that a lot of things still need to happen from now until we can bring home our first daughter!!!

So with that in mind, our baby girl is due March 3rd! Shortly after the holidays, Karen and I decided that it has been several months since we have been approved and we wanted to get ourselves in front of our case worker Melissa a little bit more. We understood that it is still early in the process, but if she is going to be an advocate for us she'll have to get to know us better. With that in mind, we decided we would start calling Melissa to try to get a better understanding of where we are in the process and get a better expectation of when we could possibly start getting some action. Karen had a call with Melissa sometime the week of January 7th. While it was a good conversation, she gave us the expectation that we may not hear anything at all until summer or even fall! With that in mind, we reset our internal expectations and started planning more trips and activities to make this time go by quicker. Melissa did tell Karen to plan a huge expensive trip that can't be refunded b/c inevitably that is when you get a call:-) So we have been waffling over a trip to Vail in March that we put the full court press in planning. Almost exactly the next day after solidifying our ski trip for Vail, Melissa calls Karen and says they have a birth mother that they want to show our profile to. We were ecstatic about the news! My thought was that this is the first time our profile was being shown, so let's not expect too much from this. Melissa also set the same expectation, but that eitherway she will let us know of her decision. I think this was a Thursday. The weekend went by and I didn't think too much about it, however it consumed Karen! Wouldn't you know it but Karen's intuition was right on! The following Tuesday Melissa calls us and says that she loved our profiled and wanted to talk to us that night! Good thing we had only a 4 hour window to think about this call cuz it would have drove us through the roof about all the different possibilities! The call went wonderfully. She was the sweetest thing! It was refreshing to hear that she was as nervous about the call as we were.

The next day we get a call from Melissa and she informs us that we are officially matched! The birth mother had the same reaction to our phone call and she wanted to move forward with the adoption plan! So to solidify the match we were to fly down to Texas and meet the birth mother. So Super Bowl weekend, Karen and I flew out to Texas and met with our birth mother. It was an incredible meeting! It could not have went any better! After a lunch and a coffee in Texas we need to get ourselves ready for a March 3rd delivery!!!

Those are some of the details for now. I will add more as we move along!