Too much excitement!!!

Our family had a very exciting January!  The first thing was that we sold our house.  We are moving to a new house that will be a lot closer to Wayne's office.  We're trading a 45 minute commute for a 10 minute commute.  That will be a very happy thing for us.  But we are very sad to be leaving our home where we lived for the past 8  1/2 years, pretty much Benjamin's whole life because he was a tiny baby when we moved in.  We have so many fabulous friends and neighbors that we will miss (though we still hope to see some of you occasionally!).  And we loved our house.  Here's our "old house":

We are renting a townhouse until our new house is done, which will hopefully only be a few more weeks!  If anyone needs to buy or sell a house in Utah, we had the best realtor ever!  We were showing our house about every other day, and we got an offer on our house about once per month while it was listed.  It was nice to have the old house sold before the new house was done, but it was difficult to find a rental for that short time.  We had to call a ton of places before we found one that would give us a month to month rental contract.  Moving wasn't as bad as it might have been, though, because we had so many nice neighbors and family members come help us.  We're living out of boxes now because I refuse to unpack and repack for this short amount of time.

The perfect ending to our story

About one month ago, we received an email from our caseworker at LDS Family Services, telling us that she had some birth mom profiles from another agency.  We've gotten emails like this before, and sometimes we've looked into them.  With all of the craziness in my life at that time, I thought I wasn't even going to look through the profiles.  But I did.  And I immediately liked the one for a potential birth mom named Rosa.  We called up the adoption agency and asked that our profile be included in the ones shown to her.  She saw it and liked it enough to want to meet us.  Wayne was out of town on business, but he flew home early from his conference.  We met with Rosa at the agency, and it just clicked for all of us.  As we were driving home, the agency called to tell us that Rosa had picked us!

It's a birth mom's prerogative  to change her mind, although we really didn't think Rosa would.  We still didn't tell the whole world that we were hoping to get our baby soon, but we were very excited.  Rosa was due on Valentine's Day with a girl.  We wanted to get to know her better, so we met up with Rosa and her caseworker for lunch a couple of times. We even took her out to dinner and had Daniel and Benjamin come along.  As the due date got closer, we found out that Rosa was scheduled to be induced on Friday, February 10, so that's what we prepared for.  But on Wednesday, February 8, we got a phone call telling us it was time to get to the hospital.  I met Wayne there because he was coming from work.  Rosa invited me to be in the delivery room and everything.  I even got to cut the umbilical cord.  And sure enough, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.  Being with Rosa as she gave birth with the intention of placing her baby in our family was incredible.  It was one of the most Christ-like acts I have ever witnessed. 

As per Utah law, the adoption papers could not be signed until 24 hours after the birth, and Rosa signed them then.  It was hard for Rosa because she loves her baby so much, but it was also because she loved her so much that she was able to place little Amanda for adoption with our family.  We love and admire Rosa so much!  So, that's the short version of one of the most amazing things to ever happen to our family.  There are more details I could add, but that part of the story isn't really meant to be shared in a public blog.  I will say that there were "divine signatures" everywhere in the whole situation.  It's literally a miracle that everything happened just the way it did.  

We are all madly in love with our new little princess!