Seventh Birthday

On Wednesday, Allison will be 7. We had her birthday party yesterday and she had such a good time. I can't believe my baby is going to be 7. I remember that little tiny thing that we brought home from Vietnam 6 1/2 years ago.
Our journey started right away when we got married. We decided not to prevent pregnancy because we knew we wanted to have children and suspected that I would have issues because my sister's did. Among the 3 sisters there is only 1 biological child. My oldest sister and I were never able to get pregnant. We got married in 1996. In 1999, we went to see an infertility specialist. I went through 3 months of clomid and it was horrid. I have never experienced the emotions that I experienced on those pills. We then chose to move on to injectibles. Well, in that time we had an insurance change and no more coverage for infertility and there we stopped.
In Jan. 2000, I ended up in the hospital for hemorrhaging. I had to get blood transfusions and had to have a D&C and still ended up being in there for almost 3 days because I wouldn't stop bleeding. I felt my body had betrayed me. I just wanted a hysterectomy, but my Dr. wouldn't hear anything about that. I had been thinking about going back into treatment in June of that year but after that happened, I couldn't bring myself to it.
By the end of 2000, we had pretty much decided we were going to adopt and we wanted to adopt from Vietnam. We started gathering some paperwork and I was checking out agencies and emailing them questions. One night we went to an information meeting of an agency that was only about 45 minutes away from us and we decided we would use them. It really turned out to be a good choice. We applied in Feb.
We started all the paperwork and attending the required classes and we were DTV by April 25th. We requested either gender and that pretty much assured us that we would be referred a boy. At that time, we were told that it would probably be around 10 months for a referral, but it could be longer. So, we went on with our lives.
In August, we decided to take a vacation one last time before becoming parents. I emailed our agency and just said that I knew we were no where near getting a referral, but here is where we will be. Well, when we got back to the hotel room Friday night after being out all day there was a note to call our agency. We couldn't figure out what they wanted, there was no way we had a referral already. But, why else would they call our hotel when we were on vacation. I called our agency numerous times and left messages over the weekend. I am sure when they checked the answering machine Monday morning they thought I was a complete nut. I then called back as soon as I knew they would be in on Monday morning. They were all in a meeting. Ugh!!!! I had to be in a meeting at 9, this was really starting to bug me. At our meeting, they served breakfast first and just as I was finishing eating, my cell phone rang. I ran out of that building so fast.
When I answered the phone, she told me that we had a referral. What, it had been less than 4 months!?!?! And guess what???? It was a girl. She was born premature and because we had marked a little box on our paper saying that we would consider a child born prematurely (and no one on the girl only list had marked that), we got her referral. She gave me all the details and said she would send the pictures by email. She was then going to call Brad and give him all of the details, but I got to him first and told him that the call was coming. We agreed to meet at home later when my meeting would be over to view the email together.
When we opened that email, there was the most beautiful face we had ever seen. We consulted our family Dr., who said bring her home and we'll deal with any medical issues and we consulted and IA Dr. who said she could have a million things wrong with her and I wouldn't accept her referral. We knew when we saw her picture that she was our daughter, but we prayed about it and we made the agency wait until Friday until we gave them our answer.
Then things changed with the processing of adoptions. We all of a sudden had to make 2 trips. So, we hurried up and we were scheduled to leave on our first trip on September 14th, 2001. Well, we all know what happened there. I was so scared. I thought I would never get to hold my baby. Our flights were rescheduled for the 21st. We were going. I had a friend say to me that I was nuts for getting on a plane and going over there. I wanted to tell her that if her daughter was on the other side of the world and the only way for her to get her was to get on that plane, she would have been on that plane so fast. So, we went.
I will finish this in another post. I love telling the story of my Baby Boo.