How did Amina join our family? Well, I'll tell you the story...
First week of March 2009 - Jacob and Laura are finally approved as an adoptive couple and our profile is published online. Happy day!
March 11 - We are contacted by a birth mom living in Utah who is interested in placing with us if adoption is what she decides. We wait and hope for the best.
May 28 - Things work out for the Utah birth mom and she decides to keep her baby. We are happy things worked out for her but we are, of course, disappointed that we don't get to be parents yet.
Sunday June 7, 2009 - We get our first email from Amina's birth mom from the Oregon Coast. After our last experience, we try very hard not to get excited.
July and August - We wait and hope, getting encouraging emails here and there. Our sanity is just about to go out the window when
August 31, 2009, 4 pm - We get confirmation from the doctor that our birth mom is pregnant and that she is due "any day"! We get a car seat from our friend that night - "just in case."
September 1, 2009 (the next day) - I (Laura) am scheduled to work at the hospital and my coworkers give me the easiest assignment - an easy delivery - because they can see I have "baby on the brain" and am pretty much good for nothing difficult. At 10:45 pm my patient is minutes away from having her baby when Kathy, my coworker, comes into my patient's room, taps me on the shoulder and says, "Can you step outside for a minute?" Once outside, she says, "It looks like you are going to Newport tonight: your husband is on the phone." I run down the hallway to where my coworkers are grinning and giggling at the nursing station and Katherine is holding the phone out to me. I say, "You guys are pranking me, right?" But then lightning goes through my body as I hear Jacob's voice on the other end saying, "She's in hard labor and she's driving herself to the hospital."
What happened next is a blur. I paced around for a little bit unable to think straight, called the caseworker and confirmed, finished my charting, waved goodbye to my fabulous coworkers who were saying, "go on, get out of here, we'll take care of everything," and got out to the car by 11 pm. I tried very hard not to speed home where Jacob was furiously packing. Soon we were all packed and on the road toward Newport via Tillamook. I remember the drive was gorgeous. The moon was shining brightly, casting brilliant light on the trees and the ocean, creating a moon path to the horizon. I thought to myself: A herald of our baby's birth. As we got near to Tillamook, we decided we had better think of names. The girl name was easy. Jacob has always liked Amina. It is a special name to him. I have always loved the name Liana. I woke up one morning and saw it written in my head and loved it. When I found out what it meant, I loved it even more. Amina Liana works so well and so lyrically, we didn’t have to discuss it any more. That was it. We felt very warm and happy about that name.
Trying to decide on a boy’s name was much harder. We had thought about Joseph Jacob in the past, but those names are so common. We wanted our baby (if it were a boy) to have a name that he could call his own. We thought and thought and talked and talked, and we even resorted to reading all the store signs and street names as they went by: "Hmm, maybe Fred, how about Meyer?" trying to think of something good.
We were about 20 minutes away from the hospital when I called Julie, the caseworker, who was also on her way to the hospital. She said, “I was just about to call you. I just got word from the hospital, and she has just been born. You are the proud parents of a baby girl! Congratulations Mom and Dad!” I looked over at Jacob and said with astonishment, “We have a GIRL!” Jacob had thought she would be a boy, so this news was a little shock, but it took about a split second for him to get over it and we were both so happy. We were so so happy. One of the first thoughts I had was, well, no wonder we had such a hard time thinking of the right boy’s name; Our little girl had already been born! She was born at 0106 in the morning on September 2, 2009. Eight pounds, one ounce, 20 1/4 inches long, with brown hair that stuck up on top. We didn’t know this yet, though. All we knew is that she had been born, and we tried really hard not to speed all the rest of the way to the hospital. Julie the adoption caseworker beat us there by a few minutes and we met her outside the hospital room door where Amina's birth mom was waiting inside. We went in and met her and gave her hugs and thank you’s. There is nothing we could do or say to express the depth of our gratitude for such an incredible gift.
The nurses said they would bring our baby girl to us but that we ought to wash our hands first, so we went into the bathroom to wash our hands.
Daddy got to see her first. He saw her as they wheeled her into the room. He whispered to me excitedly, “I saw her! She’s really cute.” So with our hands clean, we went in to meet our little girl. When I touched her I felt so happy that my throat choked up and my voice wouldn’t work. Could it be that here was my little daughter? It was, and she is.
