Referralversary

One year ago, I was minding my own business. It was my day off and I was in full nesting mode. The project for the day was to shred years of useless paperwork. I made myself a cup of coffee and planned to hang out in my sweats and get cozy with the paper shredder. All was going well and then.....

At 12:53pm the phone rang. I was sitting on the floor with a big bag of shredded paper and jumped up to answer it. I saw on the caller ID that it was from a 651 area code. Was this it?? Could it be??? I went to answer the phone and got all static. I freaked out and ran downstairs to get the other phone but it was too late. By this time I was pretty much hysterical. I was trying to call the number back and then my cell phone rang, and if you haven't guessed yet. It was "the call". The call we had been waiting 11 months, 2 weeks and 1 day for but whose counting :)

I was trying to frantically write down everything my specialist said but got lost after "It's a girl". Thank goodness for email or I would have missed it. I was shaking and crying and saying a lot of uh huhs and okays in between tears. We finally had a name and a story. I got off the phone with my specialist and immediately called my husband. Our specialist had emailed both of us the referral info. We agreed to open it together. And when we did this is what we saw, our baby girl Yewibdar.

Her name means "most beautiful one" in Amharic and we couldn't have agreed more. She was 5 1/2 weeks old and weighed in at 6lbs and was 19.5 inches long. She had so much hair and the tiniest little feet I have ever seen. She still does have these completely adorable tiny little feet. We quickly scanned through all the info but just kept going back to the pictures. There were two. Here is the other one.

I have slept with this exact picture by my bed for a year. It is also prominently shown in our living room. I at that time wondered if she still made that concerned face. She does. I couldn't tell if she was lost, sad, confused, annoyed, mad or something else. Now we get the face when she is overwhelmed.

I can't believe it has been a whole year. So much has changed. I am a mother, my baby girl is fastly becoming a big girl and all the while one thing has never changed. I have never for one second since I saw that sweet face ever doubted that I was in love. My broken road to parenthood was no longer broken as of January 6, 2009. I will never forget where I was, what I was doing or for that matter what I was wearing (my gray sweats and pink AHOPE shirt).

But most importantly, my life changed that day. I had a daughter. A daughter that was half way around the world and I was months away from holding her in my arms. Yet I had two pictures, a name and a story to keep me going. This was a watershed moment in my life.

So today I pause to look back and remember the feelings, the fears, the excitement, the sadness that all came with this one phone call. It wasn't just merely a phone call, it was a door opening to the rest of my life. My daughter is the most precious, beautiful and wonderful gift. A gift I am eternally grateful for and I have no words to adequately express my love for her or for her Ethiopian mother. One phone call and a year later and I wouldn't change a thing.