Remembering

I'm sitting here on my lunch break and suddenly remembering the first day we saw Lily. What a flood of emotions it was! The trip short drive from the airport to the hospital seemed excruciatingly long. Then, we wanted to stop by and pick up flowers for Lily's birth mother. That was an experience in it's self. We wanted them to be just right. Not too difficult for her to carry home, but still beautiful.

I've written before about the amazing first few moments of meeting our daughter, her birth mom and Christina. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned the phone calls home. None of our family knew we had a potential adoption situation. They had no clue we were in California. After we met Lily's birth family and things felt so "right" and we knew it was for real and forever, we called our parents.

Before the calls, we had quickly snapped some photos of our new little family and Corey ran across the street from the hospital to find wifi and upload them into an email. He titled the email "Best catch yet". You see, in the days immediately preceding Lily's arrival, Corey had been fishing daily and sending photos of the lunkers to both of our families. Seeing fish photos was nothing new to them. So we figured an email with a title like that would not give anything away. The email simply had the photos, Lily's full name, height and weight. Nothing more.

When we called each of our family members, we immediately fired off the email. Luckily, they were home. When Corey called his mom and asked her to check her email, it took her awhile to open the right one. After she did, she just started to cry. We couldn't really hear anything through all the crying. When we called my parents and asked them to check their email, they kept asking why. I said because Corey had a really good catch and I wanted them to check it out. My dad kept insisting that he had seen the photos already (he was thinking of the fish photos) and so he wouldn't go with my mom to the computer to look. I kept insisting that they probably hadn't seen this one and reluctantly my dad joined my mom to check their email. When it finally popped up, my mom casually said "I don't get it. Who's baby is that?". I said "Mom, she's our baby.". She then half screamed, half cried at the top of her lungs "WHAT?????.....WHAT?????.....WHAT????? It took her a long while to calm down enough to talk rationally. Let me tell you, there were lots of happy tears that day. I called my brother and guess what he did? He half screamed, half cried at the top of his lungs "WHAT?!!!!!....WHAT?!!!!!.....WHAT?!!!!". No doubt, he is my mother's son.

Later that day, I called my friends. I distinctly remember calling Lexi and Laura. Lexi asked "What's up". I said "Well, for one, I'm a mom...". She cried and cried and said a bunch of stuff I couldn't understand, garbled through all the tears. We cried and cried and celebrated from opposite sides of the country. When I called Laura, she cut me off and said "Hey, can I call you back?" I said sure and we hung up. She called back a few minutes later and I told her the news. She was driving and had to pull over because she was crying so hard that she couldn't see the road. Her daughter was in the back seat and she started crying because her mom was screaming and crying. Laura had to keep telling her "They are happy tears, sweetie!!!".

What fun memories these are. I can't imagine it happening any other way :)