When we found out about Grant

Here is the story of how we found out about our baby boy.  First we will start where we left off...  with the "unfortunate weekend".  As you can tell from my last entry, we were quite devastated.  Although we hadn't met the Birth Mother of that baby, we already felt connected to her and felt like she was supposed to be in our family.  But God had other plans.  It was, strangely enough, harder to deal with than when we lost Anayah.  When we lost Anayah, we were shocked, angry, hurt and stressed to the max.  So I don't think we dealt with her loss as we should have.  We kind of locked all of those emotions away and pretended as though it had never happened.  But when we lost this baby, all those feelings that we had bottled up came forward and the feelings of rejection, anger, frustration, and sadness came to the front of our minds times 2.  I felt like we were dealing with 2 losses, not just the one.  I felt betrayed and that I could never trust a Birth Mother again, because, like Anayah's BM, this one told us that she could never hurt us and that she couldn't believe that anyone could have done what Anayah's BM did to us.  She promised us the world and in a moment she took it all away.  I felt like we had a giant sign on our heads that said, "Please hurt us".  Joe handled it much better than I did, which at times was hard for me to understand.  Sometimes I would feel like I was the only one who wanted this and that it didn't really matter to him the way it mattered to me.  He told me several times that he was hurt too and that he wanted it just as bad as I did, but that he felt he needed to be strong to take care of me and my needs. (Man, I have the greatest husband in the world!)  I had a hard time with that, and I don't know why.  I guess I just felt like I needed to know that he wanted this as badly as I did.  But those rare times, when he did break down, broke my heart in two and I understood what he felt watching me go through it and I am grateful that he stayed strong as much as he did. 

In April, I was fed up.  All those "hot coals in our fire" that we were told about were now cold.  This BM stopped us from not only getting the baby that she promised to us, but she stopped any other BM from choosing us and they obviously went on to select other families.  I felt like there was no end in sight and I wanted to look into IVF again, so the weekend of our family reunion April 12th and 13th, we went to St. George to talk to a fertility specialist (who we heard was more affordable than the specialists here)  We had a consultation with him and the next day while all the family was meeting up, we went to the hospital to get some blood work done.  I got quite discouraged after meeting with this Dr. because I realized that IVF is not something we will ever be able to afford and he wanted me to do some really crazy things to get me pregnant that I wasn't willing to do.  So that Monday, I called our caseworker and asked how I could get some counseling.  We decided that in order for us to get counseling that we didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for, she would do it for us.  She booked out the rest of her Friday afternoon for us and we went on April 19 and talked to her for 4 hours straight.  She helped me with a lot of the built up anger I was holding for Anayah's BM and this other BM.  She helped me with a lot of other things too that are too personal to share. Then we started talking about how I felt like Joe and I weren't good enough to get a BM (who wasn't completely insane) to even consider us.  Or that there was something wrong with us.  How I felt like we were just destined to keep being hurt and how I felt like this BM stopped us from getting our child.  She told me that I needed to let go of those feelings and that she didn't feel like this BM stopped us from getting a baby.  I was pretty upset by that comment and kind of felt even worse, because she had told us, when we were picked in February, that there were several BM's who were seriously considering us and that we were very likable.  Now she was telling us that we didn't miss out on anything when this BM took us off the list.  I think she could tell that I was hurt by this because she then said, reluctantly, "if you had something in the works would you want to know? Even if it was so high risk that it probably won't happen?"  Joe and I looked at each other and quickly decided that, knowing there is someone who liked us was better than thinking no one did, even if it seemed so unlikely.  She then proceeded to tell us about this BM and BF who had chosen us but that it was so high risk that she was planning on not telling us until it was time to go pick up the baby.  She told us that the BM was having a boy and that he was due at the end of June but that she thinks she might go early.  She asked if we were ok with a boy and of course we said YES!  She said that it was high risk because there were several legal hoops we had to jump through in order for this to work.  (Most of those are personal to the birth family so I won't go into detail), but one of those hoops was that the BF is Native American.  He was part one tribe and part another and lived on a reservation of yet another.  So we had to get the approval from all 3 tribes and it is hard enough to get the approval of one tribe.  If anything stopped this, it would be that.  She was waiting on paperwork to send to the tribes to get their permission and she knew that they take forever to decide so even if we could get this baby, there was a chance we couldn't get him from birth.  Even if the tribe approved the adoption, according to tribal laws, the BF wouldn't be able to sign papers until 10 days after the baby's birth and that had to be done in front of the tribe.  So, the earliest we thought we could get the baby was at 10 days old, if at all.  So we decided that we couldn't do that, emotionally, and we told her that we would like if she didn't tell us any more about the case until she found out for sure yes or no.  I asked if it would help our chances that I'm part NA, if we could prove it and she said that of course it wouldn't hurt.  It didn't help that there was that case that made it to the supreme court about a little NA girl who was taken from her adoptive family by her NA birth father.  So Joe and I went home and let ourselves talk about it for a little while that night.  We asked my parents if we could prove our NA background.  We called a couple of Great Aunts and Uncles and some said they could prove it and others said they couldn't.  After that, that was it.  We decided never to talk about this situation again.  Every time Joe would bring it up, I would stop him, because I would get too excited and I just knew this, like all others before, was not going to work out.  He would let his excitement about possibly having a boy get the best of him and try to bring it up, but I just couldn't think about it.  Then, on May 29, while doing a client's hair, I got a call that the agency found out that they only needed the approval of the tribe that the BF was registered with and that they had heard back from them that the baby didn't have enough of that tribe's blood in him that it would even matter.  So we were able to go forward like a normal adoption.  Then she told me that the BM's Dr said that she would have the baby girl by the end of that week.  I was so confused, she had told us that this baby was going to be a boy.  She said that she didn't know why she would have told us that because they had been telling her all along that the baby was a girl.  I didn't know what to think because, although I hadn't let myself think too much about this, I had gotten used to the thought of having a boy.  She also had originally said that the baby was due at the end of June and when she called she said that the due date was the middle of June.  Which was nice because that's sooner than the end of June, so, less time to wait!  I quickly called Joe and told him the news and he was so excited!  On Monday June 2nd our AC went out.  We had someone come look at it and by Wednesday the 4th it was fixed.  Tuesday, the 3rd, we were sitting in our hot house dying from the 95 degrees it was inside when we got the text at around 10:30pm that the BF had signed paperwork.  I cried because it was the one thing we had never been able to get in Anayah's case which caused it to go south, but mostly because I felt for him in what he had to do.  It was a bittersweet feeling.  You never realize you'd feel that way until you go through it.  I am grateful that he was able to do it, but I hurt for him because we too have had to place a child we loved dearly in the hands of another.  The baby was scheduled to come on the 7th (the day before my baby brother's graduation) but they thought he would be born before then.  We were on our toes the whole week.  I have always said (to our caseworkers, the only ones who knew about our situation) that I felt like all the things we had going on that week with the AC and graduation were to keep our minds on other things so that we didn't go crazy.  I am weirdly grateful for our AC distraction, even though it cost us an arm and a leg to fix!  The C-Section got cancelled from the 7th to the 9th which was Sunday.  I thought that was weird to schedule something for a Sunday, but it was what they had planned and we went with it.  Joe had to give a talk in church that day and we were both so overwhelmed with everything that Joe felt like he hadn't prepared well enough.  I don't even remember what his talk was about and he doesn't even remember that he talked!  I was checking my phone all day and at noon I got a text from our caseworker that she had never been taken to the hospital and that she didn't know when she would get to go.  We didn't get to say goodbye to my sister who was in town from AZ because we didn't want anyone to know what was happening, in case it didn't work out, so we didn't want to be at my parent's house and get the call to go to the hospital and have everyone get suspicious.  We ended up spending the day together at home talking about all the possibilities.  I decided that, since we didn't know the gender of the baby for sure, (even though everyone seemed sure it was a girl) I would make 2 beanies...

one for a boy. I made a blue football one...

  

and one for a girl, a pink and gray one with a flower.(I boxed the beanie away, but this is the flower that pinned to it)

  

then at the hospital, they could put the beanie on the baby of which ever gender he was.  Now we just had to wait!