You are currently viewing Fourth Time Is a Charm–Finally Our Baby. The One We Should Have

Fourth Time Is a Charm–Finally Our Baby. The One We Should Have

Three failures and then hooray-

On Saturday, June 11, at 6:45 pm, we were having dinner out with friends. My phone rang. Pulling it out, I saw “Darla H2H”. “Probably just checking in,” I whispered to myself. I slipped outside of the restaurant and answered. “Hey, put Lane on, and I’m going to conference in Donna,” (the director) were the words I heard.

This didn’t sound like a check-in! I went into the restaurant with my heart pounding, got Lane, and we headed back outside. We listened as she told us about a baby boy in Texas, a few hours old, waiting for a forever family. Would we consider being that family?

“Yes! Thousand times, yes!”

“So, how soon can you leave,” they ask.

“Very soon,” was our answer.

We went back into the restaurant in a daze. Our girls and our friends were done eating, and they knew something was going on. We swallowed a few bites, then headed home.

In a hurry, we packed our suitcases, did a few things that had to be done at home, dropped our girls off at my parents’ house, and headed south.

We had 15 hours to worry, be excited, and move back to worry again. Of course, a few minutes of crippling fear tossed in to keep things interesting. Twenty minutes before arrival, we received a message from the case worker who had already flown to Texas. The birth mom had already signed relinquishment. We were in the clear on this one.

We arrived at the hospital and went straight to the cafeteria to sign our papers, as the notary desperately needed to get on the road. In complete disbelief, we wrote our names over and over.

“Will you love and care for this child as you would a biological child?” Check.

We were confident we would, but in fact, we hadn’t even met him yet, and we were getting a little bit desperate! Finally, at long last, we walked through the NICU, following a nurse that was leading us to our son, a wee boy that was ours before we’d even said hello. We walked into a room, and there he was. He had a head full of black hair, perfect skin, chubby cheeks, and enormous eyes. We fell in love instantly. It was so beautiful, knowing he was ours to keep from the first moment we laid our eyes on him, and that love keeps growing.

The empty space in our hearts is full. When we hold him, and he looks back at us with his dark eyes, when we see his beautiful smile and hear his soft coo, when we watch him eating a bottle in the night, when he looks into the bassinet and see his beautiful sleeping face, when we see him sitting with his sisters, our hearts overflow with thankfulness.

Almost daily, we find ourselves whispering, “Thank you, God, for helping the others not to work out because this little boy was made for our family, and we were made for him.”

We like to think that somehow, the disruptions led us to him, that all along, God knew that the pain we were feeling was going to lead to exquisite happiness, that he had hand-picked the baby that was made for us.

And that, our tiny, precious boy, is the story of our journey to you—a story of heartbreak that ended in profound joy.

Read about the first three failures.