Part Three - The Longest Blog Story Ever!

...so where were we? (this feels so good to remember all of this stuff!)

So how do you tell your friends that in less than 24 hours, you are FINALLY going to be parents? People that have known how much we wanted a baby...people that have prayed for us so many times... It was so much fun. We had the picture of baby boy with us - the one that Abilene emailed us. One of our 1st stops was going by to see Patty up at church. She was in her office. She was, of course, surprised to see both of us during the day. (Now you'll have to remember that by this time, little Maisy was already about 2 1/2 weeks old.)

When Patty asked us what we were up to, we plopped the picture of the baby boy down in front of her and said "we wanted to show you a picture of Maisy's new boyfriend." She looked at the picture and gave a little "awwwwwwww" then she asked

"who is this a picture of?"

We said "this is our son that we are picking up in Abilene tomorrow!!!!!"

Patty had one of the funniest reactions. The first thing she said, as she covered her mouth with her hand was "I'm going to throw up!"

What a funny reaction! She called Wade up right away and we all celebrated.

We went over to Brenda's and sort of did the same thing with her - telling her we had to come over to show her this picture - of OUR BABY!!!!!

It was so much fun to surprise everyone and shock them!

We made several more stops and then went home to make a ton of phone calls to family and friends. The rest of that day was a blur for me. I was in the middle of preparing for my first Just Between Friends sale to begin in just a few days. (This was October 2nd, and our sale set-up began on October 8th.) This was a sale that Pam and I were throwing together very quickly, and we were actually going to have it at my house. Wow. I had furniture moved here and there, piles of sale materials all over the place. We had had such a great response to our first sale, that we knew we were having to move outside into the backyard and put up tents for our sale, so I had had the tree trimmer come over and trim a bunch on our backyard tree. All of that was piled all the way across the front of my house. We were in a house in transition, preparing for the sale, preparing to have strangers wandering in the front door, shopping in the house and then wandering out the back door to shop more outside. Now we needed to be a home ready to bring a baby home to the next day! To say the least, it was overwhelming!

I cannot remember what else we did besides pack for the new baby, go out and buy formula (Kelly did this very late at night - like all good dads do!), and work on a name for this precious baby boy. As I recall, the night flew by. We had much to do to - a lot of it had to do with getting our crazy mixed up house ready for guests. I had previously prepared a list of about 50 boys names that I liked. (This was one of those things I did to help pass the time when we were either trying to have a child or waiting to get word on a baby to adopt.) So the negotiating began. Kelly's rules were this:

1. Not a name that you cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl. (He had dealt with this enough in his own lifetime.)
2. Not a name that could be shortened.
3. A "strong" name.

We worked it down to about 5 names by about 10:00 p.m. or so. By midnight, I think we had finally decided on "Blake".

Middle name work began at midnight. UGH!

We were able to do that quicker - as it was easier to eliminate names that didn't work well with "Blake" or "Morrison". It was about 1:00 a.m. and we were exhausted, so we went to bed with about 3 possible middle names - but we were leaning towards "Andrew". We decided that we would make the final decision on the trip to Abilene! Nothing like waiting until the last minute!

We awoke to the most amazing day of our lives...and I'll have to post more on that later!