THE NEWS WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!!!

Disclaimer: This will probably be the longest blog post you will ever read. You have been warned! That said, thanks for reading about our exciting news!!

It was 9:50 pm Tuesday night when we received a call from our adoption caseworker Katherine from the Provo agency. Shane whispered "It's Katherine!" excitedly. I glanced at the clock and knew this call couldn't just be normal business as it was almost 11:00pm in Utah. Katherine made small talk as we sat on the couch smashed as close as we could get and holding the phone sandwiched between our ears. My heart beat hard and fast. Katherine finally said she had some paperwork that she needed to e-mail to us and have us fax back to her ASAP. She made it sound like it was something we needed to sign, and I knew that it might be the release of our file to the Mesa agency, so I tried not to get too excited. However, it was still too late for normal business, and I was getting excited. In addition, she said she was going to e-mail something and then would call us back after we got it to talk to us...

Well, then we waited 5... 10... 20 minutes, clicking constantly on the refresh button in the browser, my heart still racing.............. the phone finally rang again and I answered it before it even finished the first ring. It was Katherine again. After a quick discussion, we realized that she'd typed our e-mail address in wrong. It was an innocent mistake. In the e-mail address, my name is "shaneandmeg..." and she typed ''shaneandmegan..." So she said she'd try again and then call us after we'd received it. We were really excited at this point because it was now getting close to 11:30 pm, and Katherine was determined to get this "paperwork" to us that night.

Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing the browser, and finally a new e-mail popped up with the subject line "Open this document first." When we opened it, there were just the words: "Hi-- open and print." We clicked on the attachment and we saw this:

Tears fell, I sobbed actually, but I was surprised at how quickly I recovered from the overwhelming emotions and a perma grin came up on my face. I think it had something to do with the fact that I knew this was only the beginning of an announcement and I was excited to get back to the inbox to see what was next. A new e-mail had popped up with the subject line “Open this 2^nd.” Attached to this e-mail was the following image:

Wow. This took me an incredibly long time to read because I was just so overwhelmed by it all. I was crying again too. Have you ever had the experience where you are so anxious to read something that you have to keep starting over because you find yourself skipping lines or words? That was me. I somehow managed to get through it and we quickly clicked back to the inbox to open the third e-mail entitled “Third and final!” This was very exciting as we now were going to find out the gender of the baby that would be ours. We could see that the attachments were ultrasound images. We opened them as quickly as we could to see these:

Just as the phone rang again, I was reading the word "BOY" printed on the ultrasound image that told us the baby's gender. Shane answered the phone as I gasped and exclaimed "A boy! It's a boy!!" I could hardly believe it! I'll admit I was very surprised. I'm not sure if it's because we were so sure about a girl’s name, or if it’s because both of us come from families where the firstborn was a girl, or maybe it’s because I simply have a harder time resisting baby girl “stuff.” Maybe it was a combination of all these things. Who knows for sure, but I was grabbing Shane's arm, shaking it, and whispering excitedly "It's a boy!" over and over again!

Anyway, I realized at this point that Shane was talking to Katherine again. He had put her on speakerphone, so I tried to listen to what she was telling us about the birthmother we now knew was named Jesse, but my mind was racing and it took a lot to stay focused. We finally said good-bye to Katherine and we conferred about whether we could still call anyone this late at night. We decided we’d call Shane’s parents because we thought there was a good chance they’d still be up. Shane tried to pretend he was thoughtlessly calling for a recipe, but he’s not the best liar. He was absolutely beaming as he announced that a “man cub” was on the way.

Well, needless to say, although we are glad Katherine didn’t wait to call us the following day, we didn’t sleep much that night. We are SO happy! Our dream to be parents is finally being realized! If you have made it this far, we thank you very much for your support and prayers through this adoption process. We’ll continue to add updates as things progress. Here we go on a new journey toward adding a little munchkin to our family! Yee-Haw!