It was mid-March 2015 when we finally got our adoption profile approved and posted on adoption.com. I remember the entire day after we finally posted it that I anxiously watched my email and phone as if calls would just start pouring in! But nothing. The first few days I was on the site ALL day checking stats and looking at how many people had viewed our page. On Saturday April 4th at about 9 pm I was coloring Easter eggs with family and friends and my phone started ringing... it was a number I did not recognize. My heart stopped and I ran into the front room to answer it. There was a quiet and timid voice on the other end of the line. She was crying and clearly upset. She introduced herself and told me that she was on the search for a couple to adopt a little girl that she was due with in three weeks. She was from New Mexico and was 24. I talked to her for a moment and then decided to leave to go home and meet Mason... we were going to Skype with her. Before we knew it was after midnight and we had been talking to this birth mom over Skype for almost 3 hours! We prayed with her, she was having contractions so we helped her count them and how far apart they were, we told her about our religion and answered her questions, we talked about when the baby was due and our plans for parenthood.... and then at almost 2 AM, while we were on Skype with her, she went into labor. She buckled over and said "When can you guys be here!?" We told her we could look at flights and she screamed "just hurry" and closed her computer. I immediately text her, no answer. One more text before bed... no answer. The next morning I woke up and had no messages or calls from her. So I text her and in response she sent me a picture of a beautiful baby girl wrapped in pink. My heart felt like it might explode. I showed Mason but neither of us could shake this weird feeling, this wasn't right. So I tried to call her and she ignored my call. She text me instantly and said she had bad service at the hospital. I asked her how she was feeling... no answer. At the same time my phone buzzed from a new notification on Facebook... I had been added to a private Facebook group for hopeful adoptive couples who are using adoption.com. As I began to scroll through the page I was reading post after post after post about "scams." . I kept skimming through the page and before I knew it I was checking every post for the name or number of our sweet birth mom... and boom. There it was. Here name, her number, her story - marked "EMOTIONAL SCAM." I posted my own paragraph asking who had talked to her and more about their experience. One couple had flown ALL the way to New Mexico, gone to the hospital, only to get there and find no one checked in under her name, turn right around and come home empty handed and heart broken. I asked "what about the picture she sent?" and a sweet mom told me how to " reverse google search" the image. So I did. And a blog belonging to someone across the country popped up. Different name, different city, different story... I broke down. So I decided to call the hospital in New Mexico, where she was from. I called all 3 hospitals in her city and no one at any of them by her name. Mason held me as I cried. We couldn't understand the thought process of a person in her situation... To prey on such vulnerable and willing people, just for a moment of "emotional attachment." Later that evening after we had finally started to feel at peace, she called us. Mason answered and the first thing he said is "we are starting to wonder if this is even real..." and CLICK. She hung up. We called back and she had blocked our number. We never heard from her again.
After that experience I avoided my profile all week. I didn't want to fall victim to those feelings again and the thought that it could happen again scared me. It wasn't until the following Friday night, April 17th, that I finally logged onto our page. I posted a few more pictures and wrote a post about taking our niece and nephew on a road trip and changed a few pieces of our bio page. That was late at night around 11 pm. I began to feel hopeful again and prayed hard that someone would find us! I had an overwhelming feeling of peace and of hope, again. I logged off and went to bed.
The next day I was at work at when I checked my phone and saw I had a missed call... from a number with a different area code. My heart skipped a beat. I stepped outside and called the number back. The voice on the other line said, "Hello," and I asked for a girl named Ashley that had called me about placing her baby with us. The sweet girl on the other end of the line explained her situation, a little bit about herself. She was 19 years old and 16 weeks pregnant. She lived in Oklahoma but had been raised in Utah and as a member of the LDS church.
I fell in love with Ashley instantly! I talked to her for about a half hour while I was pacing around outside of my work and I could not shake this instant, strong, emotional connection that I felt with this amazing young woman! When we hung up I called Mason in tears and said, "this is it." I could hear Mason getting emotional over the phone as we talked about my conversation with Ashley. After I hung up with him Ashley sent me her most recent ultrasounds and crocodile tears started rolling down my cheeks. I felt so strongly about this experience. It had such a peaceful and real feeling to it. It was so much different than what we had experienced with our last contact. The following day Mason and I got to talk to Ashley on the phone for a while. She informed us that we are the only family she was talking to and that she had searched pages of families and had felt connected to our story and to us! She wanted to continue talking and preparing to place her baby with us. Mason and I wanted to be optimistic but we also were very timid because of our previous experience. But, we could not shake the feeling that this was right. I don't think we have ever prayed that hard or that often as we did those first few days. We could not shake and did not want to ignore the amazing connection we had made with our sweet Ashley! We continued to talk and bond with Ashley over the next few weeks! After talking to Ashley almost every day and getting to know everything we could about her and visa-versa, she told us that we were who she had chosen to place her baby with. May 11th was the day that she was finding out the gender and she wanted to share it with us as soon as she could. So there we were, in Universal Studios in Florida, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, waiting for her to call. She was going to face time us as soon as she was out of the appointment. We waited and waited and Mason even fell asleep and before we knew it our phone was ringing. Below is a video of the moment we found out. We were beyond excited to find out that we were going to be welcoming little BOY rose to our family. Ashley sent us some ultrasound pictures that day and it's been the background on my phone ever since.
After that we couldn't wait any longer to make baby purchases. After all we had already waited THREE years! First purchase, my dream stroller and car seat. And slowly we started gathering baby things! Clothes, a diaper bag, crib, car seat, stroller, diapers and more. We have recently finished painting the accent wall in our nursery and are getting ready to register for baby things! I still text Ashley almost every day and she has been so amazing about making us feel like we are already that little boy's parents. We are so beyond happy that we recently got to share our exciting news with all of you as well! We can not adequately express how grateful and beyond excited we are to be parents! Thank you ALL for your love and support. We love you!
I also just want to give a special thank you and we love you to our beautiful, amazing birth mama, Ashley. We adore you and really love that you have become part of our little family. We can't wait to share all of Baby Boy's milestones with you and enjoy sharing his life together. We are eternally grateful for your brave decision and the selfless love that you have for our little buddy. You are strong and beautiful inside and out and we feel so grateful that we get to know you and experience this with YOU. You will forever be so special to us.
All of our love,
Randi and Mason
