The Wait

I was matched exactly a month before my son was born.  I'm a teacher and a big perk of my job is that we get the summers off, so if my son was born in July, then I would have the rest of the summer to bond with him and get used to being a mommy.

I cleaned out the guest room and picked out the perfect shade of green for his room. I'm a huge Disney fan, and Home Depot has a Disney paint section, so of course I had to buy from them. The color was Christopher Robin's Swing; again, another sign since Pooh is my very favorite Disney character and my little guy's room would have a Pooh theme. 

My mom bought the crib, mattress, and conversion rails and wrote him a card that said "For many nights of sweet dreams. Love, Nana." Just thinking about this makes me tear up even now. My grandmother bought the car seat as my birthday present, my cousins sent books and the baby monitor from my registry, and my aunt and mom took me on a Mommy shopping trip for odds and ends. The first time I went into Carters and Gymboree knowing that I was buying for MY baby made me giddy with excitement!

Choosing his name was also somewhat easy. Being a teacher and coming from a teaching family, we had a list of names that were off the table. I had always loved the name Landon, from one of my favorite movies "A Walk to Remember", but when I was officially matched, the name just didn't seem right anymore. Thanks to BabyNames.com, I found a name that went perfectly with my son's middle name (named after my father and grandfather). 

All I had to do was wait for THE CALL, and it could come at any time. I was given so many due dates: clinical, estimated, what his first mom thought her date would be. The agency was wonderful; the worker who was a liaison between the birth mothers and the adoptive parents kept me updated almost weekly, and called one Sunday to tell me the set date for the induction (if she didn't go sooner). I was so nervous that she wanted me to sit down (she tells me this through the phone) and wanted to know if I would be traveling with anyone. The answer was no, I would be going by myself. That is another story for another post.

The countdown to THE CALL was on...