Back again

What can I say....life just keeps happening to me and around me. Back in the saddle again.

Well, after the police incident that began the year 2009 for our family, things kept hopping. The month of January alone contains birthdays for my mom, my dad, Adrian, me, my Aunt Nell and Casey (Andrew's birth mother). Everyone forgot mine that year, except my office mates, and that's probably just because our Outlook program sends out reminders of birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

February brought Austin's second birthday, which fell on a Friday and we celebrated a family party by going to Hungry Howie's pizza buffet for dinner. It went pretty well...considering that towards the end of our dinner, a local boys soccer team came in for dinner...about 9 or 10 boys in all...and our 3 little ones gave those 9 or 10 much older boys a real run for their money when it came to noise and mess. So much so that upon our leaving, one of the coaches commented to me that it looks and sounds like I have my own soccer team in the making!

And because just one celebration is not enough for my boys, we had a "party at the park" for Austin in March. We invited Austin's friends from school and Sunday School, as well as family and some friends. It was a great day...pizza, cake, and a SpongeBob cake and pinata. Austin so loved the cake, he didn't want to eat it...just kept playing with the SpongeBob and Squidward candleholders they had.

March 31st brought exciting news. Very exciting news. We received a call from the attorney's office where we had placed our latest homestudy and adoption profile back in October of 2008. They had a birth mother, expecting a baby girl, that they would like to present us to! They gave us more details and asked us if we were interested. Interested? Heck, yeah! Present away! On March 31st, we received the news: we had been chosen by this birth mother to adopt her baby girl, due later in the summer! Time to shop for pink, finally!

Tax time was fast approaching, and that meant pressure, pressure, pressure for me at work. Our first meeting with our birth mother didn't occur until after April 15. When we finally did get to meet her, we got to meet her mother, as well. I was surprised when I met her, as she was tiny, especially for someone 7 months pregnant. You really could not tell she was pregnant at all. She was short and stick thin. I felt like the world's biggest galoot next to her. I looked more pregnant than she did.

The meeting went well. At one point, she asked what we planned to name the baby. We told her Marley, and then told her the story behind the name (that we were huge Bob Marley fans. Also, how back in the 90s, when we were romantically looking ahead at our future life of marriage and kids, and we picked the name Marley while eating dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant, our fortune cookie after the meal read "Your life will be made blessed by children"). How's that for a run-on sentence? That fortune, by the way, is now pasted in Marley's baby book. Our birth mother and her mother both teared up at that story. She then commented, "That's not a name". I, thinking she meant that she did not like the name Marley, replied, "Yes, it is...maybe not a common one, but it's a name." She replied back, "No, I just thought you'd pick a name beginning with "A", like all your boys". I, now feeling like not only a big galoot, but also a stupid one, realized that she had said "that's not an 'A' name", not "that's not a name". She kept tearing up...her mother, as well. My heart sunk. What if she thought I was hearing impaired, or stupid, or both?

An uncomfortable silence followed. I did not know what to say, because apparently, I was an idiot. She then looked up at me and told us her story. She said all her life, as a little girl and a young woman, she always thought that when she grew up and had a daughter, she would name her "Marlea" after her favorite aunt, Margaret, and her mother, Lea. So us having years ago chosen the name Marley, confirmed to her, in every possible way, that her baby girl was meant to be our daughter. At that point, all of us at the table were now crying. A lifelong bond was being formed. We all felt an indescribable blessing covering us. We couldn't wait for Miss Marley to join in.