One Year Ago

September 25th, 2009. A day I will ALWAYS remember. I can see it very clearly in fact. Phil was giving a CE course at the University Of Minnesota so we decided to make a get-away weekend out of the trip. It was a rainy Friday. I spent the bulk of the morning in the hotel room scrambling online to buy tickets to the FEI world games in Kentucky for this year. The tickets went on sale at 8am, and I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in my pj's watching tv - a rare treat! Since it was a crummy day, we decided that once his course was over, Phil would pick me up at the hotel and we would head to the Mall of America for a little shopping fun. Trying to leave down town Minneapolis on a Friday afternoon at 4:30 was not the greatest plan, and we ended up completely stopped in traffic gridlock on the highway. Bummer. At 5pm Phil's phone rang. He answered.... "Oh Hi Ann" (our social worker)......I froze...."you're kidding, that's great news"......my heart stopped. We had been matched...it was a BOY! I had a SON! This was the moment we had been waiting and worrying about for so long. We were finally going to be parents! It should have been the single happiest moment of my life. I remember during the long wait before this moment I envisioned just how the call would come and wondered what I would do: would I scream, would I jump for joy, would I cry?

In reality however, my actual reaction was something I had never anticipated. I did start to cry, but it wasn't the cry I expected, it was a totally panicked "oh no ...they made a mistake .... I'm not ready.... what if we made a mistake" kind of cry. Then I was horrified at my initial reaction which made me cry harder! I was a wreck, and I think my poor husband was in shock because of it! It took about ten minutes for him to calm me down and for me to actually compose my thoughts, but it wasn't until Phil pulled the referral picture up on his phone that I took a really good look at Christopher's face that all the fear went away. When I think about it now, I am ashamed that I ruined that wonderful moment for Phil..... and for myself.

Thankfully, by the time we called our parents to tell them the good news, I was over the moon! We celebrated with a lovely dinner over which we discussed boy names and spent the rest of the evening looking at every boy related toy and outfit in that crazy mall!

When I look at Christopher now, I can't imagine him not in my life. He is my son. I love him more than words could ever describe...even on his worst day! ;o) He is the light of my life, the joy in my heart! It makes me sad to this day, and I still shake my head when I think about how I panicked.