The Call!!!

So in my previous post in which I left you all hanging, mwah ha ha ha,  I left you at the call.  I got the call Thursday about 11:45 at work.  My agency never spontaneously calls us, I mean NEVER, so I was a little perplexed.  I was told that they had a file of a little girl, one year old, with an ear deformity but that looked like her only special need (SN) and would I want to look at it?  Let me think, it took me about 1.6 seconds to get out the words "YES, SEND IT NOW"  The funny thing is that ear deformity was not on our list, not that we were not ok with it but for some reason it was left off the small list we gave our agency just 2 days before.

I got the file and quickly opened it.  Jim was teaching 5th graders at Moxee that day and when he is teaching elementary I am not able to get a hold of him as easily.  I texted him and told him to get to a computer and call me as soon as possible.  I then forwarded the email with my personal email account which by the way is incredibly SLOW from work.  Jim called and I told him about the file which I was quickly devouring and committing to memory.  I told him all about her and that I thought she would be fine, he was trying to open the file with her picture but was having trouble.  All the computers at the school are Macs, we are used to PC's.  UGGG!! I told him I would try to send it in a different format and to keep checking his email until he got it then call me back.  I might have started freaking out a bit :)

I called Renee, my friend at work that knows more about files and how to manipulate them than anyone I know, she is a genius! She dialed into my computer and converted them to .jpg files.  I forwarded them to Jim.  By this time I was ready to put her file on hold but I really wanted Jim to at least see her picture first.  I waited and waited and waited for what seemed like hours and was really only minutes.  Jim called and now he could not get to his email, ACK!!  I knew the longer that this little one was not on hold the higher the chance that she would be put on hold by someone else, I told him to call me as soon as he figured it out and continues to freak out a bit.  My boss called and I quickly explained the situation.  I think she said something like "Get off the phone and just put her on hold, Cora!"  Ok I think that was the push I needed.  As I was calling our agency back I texted Jim and told him I was making and executive decision and putting her on hold.  Seconds after I got off the phone I got a text back from Jim saying she was a keeper and to go ahead.  What I later found out was that he was able to open the email on his phone which means that the picture he saw was only about 1/2 inch to an inch square.  A teeny tiny photo, later that day he found a computer to open the file and was able to see a bigger picture.

By 12:30 I had sent her file to University of Washington Adoption Medicine.  I can not say enough about these people.  They are WONDERFUL!  By 4 pm we had an appointment the next day to talk to Dr. Davies over the phone on Friday afternoon.  I think by Friday morning we had decided that we were going to accept the referral no matter the doctor said but we wanted to make sure we were not missing something big.  I tried to keep it quiet until then but I was not very good at it :)

Dr. Davies called at about 4:30 and it was a wonderful conversation!!  The first thing he said to us made me cry the first tears of joy I have shed since in a very long time.  It went something like this.  "I can tell you right now that I am going to have a lot of positive things to say about this little girl"  Oh my goodness here come the tears again!  There were still somethings to talk about and learned a lot more about her missing ear (Atresia) but nothing that said it was too much to handle. He did have some follow up questions for her orphanage but if we don't see answers it is not a big deal.  But I hope we do because he asked for updated pictures!

By 5:30 on Friday we sent the letter of intent to adopt to our agency.  We spent the next hour calling and telling people.  Then we went out to KiKi's for dinner and we both ordered Hunan dishes!  Late Saturday night we got confirmation that our agency sent the LOI to China!

What you want to know more about our little girl?  Ok, but you will have to wait until the next post on her Birthday which is tomorrow so...

to be continued...