Journey to Annalisa: August 2007

This Sunday is our second Referral Day anniversary. Here is a recap of that wonderful day, two years ago.

We had missed the previous month’s referrals by one day. Compared to today’s referral times, seven months of waiting is nothing. But it’s devastating when you think your turn has finally come and then find out that you missed seeing your baby’s picture because the cutoff is the day before your LID.

For the whole month of August I was a wreck. I managed to get through it with the help of my family and friends who tried to support and distract me any way they could. Finally September 2nd arrived. We had received the Stork Alert on the previous Tuesday but our agency told us that it would probably be three or four days before they received the referrals and started to call the families.

On Friday morning I went to work as usual although I had already told my manager and co-workers that I may receive the call and go home at any time. John was on the alert as well. The entire morning I kept checking the boards and started to see posts from many families that received the referrals. I was really hoping to receive the “Stork Has Landed” e-mail from our agency. By noon, I lost all hopes and decided to give myself a break and go to lunch. I was really disappointed and I needed to get out of the office for a little while. By the time I got back to work at 1:00 the e-mail was there. THE STORK HAS LANDED, they were going to start making the calls shortly.

Everything after that is a little fuzzy. An incredible sense of joy and excitement overcame me. I zoomed out of the office before I finished reading the entire e-mail. I got in the car and called John asking him to come home right away. Then I called my sister Grazia to give her the good news but as I called her I got scared that I didn’t read the e-mail correctly. I asked her to login my e-mail account and confirm that it said what I thought it said. Yes, I read it correctly. I told her to send out an e-mail to our friends and family and that I would call them as soon as we heard.

I got home by 1:30. I started to setup the tripod with the camcorder. I did a few test shots to make sure I had it pointed correctly. I got out my list of questions, sharpened the pencils. Got the camera out, checked my hair to make sure it wasn’t a mess; checked my face to make sure I didn’t have raccoon eyes from the tears shed in the car ride home, checked the phone to make sure it worked, checked the phone again and asked my sister to call me to make sure the phone was indeed working. By now it was 2:00pm. John got home shortly after that and we started to wait, and wait, and wait. I started to clean the house, iron some clothes, clean the house some more, checked the phone a few more times. By 4:15 I started to get really scared that we had missed the referral date, again. My heart started to sink.

Finally around 4:30 the call came in. She tried to tell us her name but neither John nor I could remember how to spell. We gave up. We had a long list of questions we planned to ask but all we could think about was how happy we were to just get the call. All we heard was that she was beautiful, with lots of hair and chubby cheeks. She would send the pictures shortly. That’s all we needed to know.

Seeing her picture for the first time was incredible. I stared at her beautiful face and scanned it for every little detail. The pictures were taken in April; she was five months old in those pictures. She was 8 months old on the day we got the call.

The rest of the day was a celebration. We decided not to e-mail her pictures to anyone but to ask them to stop by our house (we are very lucky to have most of our family and a ton of friends living close by). One by one, our family and friends came by and we proudly showed them our daughter’s picture. What an experience. After years of longing for a family, we finally had one.

I can’t believe that two years have already gone by. I have wanted to work on the adoption video for a while but never had enough time to do it. Finally for the past month I committed every minute of my spare time to creating the adoption video. It’s almost ready. This is the beginning up to the referral day. I’ll post the rest of the video later after a few more editing touch ups.