Another Retrospective - 2 years ago today

It was a Thursday. My meeting ended around 11:30 a.m. or so. The meeting was across the hall in another office. I came back to my desk and since I'd been tucked away for about an hour and a half or so, I knew I needed to check my voice mail first thing.

One message.

"Joanie, this is Kenyan at Christian Homes. Please give me a call at your earliest convenience."

So here's the deal on that. Whenever you are waiting for a baby, and you get a call from Christian Homes, your heart rate automatically speeds up.

I called Kelly at work. No answer at his desk or on his cell phone. I knew he had some conference calls set up for that day, so I figured he was in the middle of one of those. I was just going to give him a head's up that I was going to return Kenyan's call - having no idea why she was calling me - but just wanted him to know something was up. Oh well....it's probably nothing critical with her, so I'll just try to track Kelly down later and let him know what had transpired.

Call to Abilene.

"Hi Kenyan, this is Joanie returning your call."

"Hi Joanie. I just wanted to check with you and see how you were coming on picking out those baby names. When I was in your home a couple of weeks ago, you hadn't made a ton or progress on that project."

(Suspiciously) "Well, we haven't done a whole lot on it.......(long pause)..........why do you ask?"

"Because we have a baby that we want to present to you."

At this point, I'm not really sure what I said to her. I don't know if I started crying immediately or not. I was in shock! After a certain amount of stuttering and "oh, wow's", I got it together enough to ask 2 questions. (I'm not sure why I didn't ask more.)

"Is the baby already here?" "yes"

"How old is the baby" "5 1/2 weeks"

FREAK OUT TIME!!!!!!!!!

Kenyan told me to get Kelly on the phone and we'd do a conference call with her and Bob (V.P. at Christian Homes) and talk about the situation. End of call.

Now to try to track down Kelly. I tried work number and cell number again and got nothing. I called his co-worker and told her "I have to talk to Kelly. Wherever he is, I need to talk to him , NOW!" I know I was crying at this point, because I remember thinking that she would think we'd had a death in our family. She calmly said "OK, let me find him." After what seemed like forever, Kelly gets on the phone and I tell him the WONDERFUL news. He sounded very calm. I told him we needed to conference call them back, and he said he could take care of that from his end, just to give him a second and he'd call me back. End of call.

I briefly run into the hallway and tell my co-workers - there were probably 2 of them there at the time - what was going on and I'd be on a very serious phone call for a while, and I would have my door closed.

Soon, the call came from Kelly and we conferenced Kenyan and Bob in and they spent the next 45 mintues telling us about this very beautiful 5 1/2 week old baby boy. They went over everything they could think of with us. So at the end of the call - it was kinda like - "uh...so...give yourself some time, think about it, and let us know if you want him!" I'm sure that isn't how they put it, but that's the basics of it. OH MY LORD!!!!!!!!!! (and I truly mean that in the best way possible.) Kenyan told us she would fax over health history, etc. to us ASAP for us to review. She also had a picture of this little baby boy that she could email to us. We asked her to email it to both of us, at our work email addresses. We asked them when he was available to be picked up, assuming he was our's, and they said "well, you can come get him tomorrow or you can wait until Monday if you want to." SHOCK!

Kelly and I let the Abilene part of the conference call drop off, and then there we were talking just to each other. I remember it was so odd - another kind of "uh....so....do we want this baby boy or what?!" I can't even remember saying "yes" to each other or anything - it was just pretty much a "I guess this is our baby!" Oh my...the tears of joy that I was shedding! I was in the middle of a whirlwind. Kelly and I were freaking out! This was really happening to us. We were about to be parents the next day!

Part II comes later. I'm getting too worked up just remembering all of this!!!!!