Wow! It has almost been two weeks since we were blessed with the honor of being Rylee Joy’s parents and every second has been well worth the wait.

We would love to tell you all of the details, but being that Rylee is still a ward of the court, we are going to leave out a good amount of detail that we can reveal hopefully more in 7-8 months if the adoption finalization goes well. However, we would love to tell you more about our lives during the last 14 days.

To learn more about our adoption story and the process we went through, check out Our Adoption Story page.

On Thursday, September 5th, we received a phone call that started to prepare us for parenthood.

I received a phone call from our social worker about sibling set ready to be placed for adoption. Now, there were some unique circumstances in this case that we can’t talk about, but nevertheless, they called to ask if we would want to be ‘consider’ for this sibling set. Now, let’s stop here for a moment. In the adoption process with the county, we were told that we would only be called if we had been ‘selected’ as the parents for a child or sibling set, but this time we were called to see if we wanted to be ‘considered’ for this unique situation. Of course we said YES and were told that we would know the following day (Friday) if we were or weren’t selected.

Through the evening, Hubs was being super cute. He stayed up all night researching because if we were selected, we would be parents that Friday!

It started to feel weird. It is hard to explain. The situation wasn’t how we expected it to feel like.

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Friday, September 6th, we received a phone call from our social worker saying we were NOT selected. There were lots of emotions that hit us all at once. However, we were encouraged that since we had only been officially in the system for three weeks and already had our profile viewed, that it was a good sign for us. A good sign indeed.

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The following week, we had a big camping trip that had been planned for months with over 20 adults and children at a beautiful campsite near Bishop, CA. It was a Wednesday thru Sunday outing in a location with NO CELL SERVICE!

So on Monday, Hubs took off work so we could just get away and do things that we might do for awhile if we get another ‘call’. So we hit up Disneyland and a Dodgers game.

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Tuesday, September 10th is the day we will remember forever!

We received a call from our social worker saying “You have been selected to be the parents of a beautiful baby girl who was safely surrendered”. She was only days old (and currently at a foster home. We were asked to come in on Wednesday for a presentation.

If they had called us a day later, we would not of received this miracle phone call as we would of been camping out of cell phone service! Crazy! It was God’s perfect timing. When we got this call, I was minutes away from going grocery shopping for our camping trip! Needless to say, we ended up not going camping 😉

Wednesday came along and we had to wait until late afternoon to meet with the county officials for a formal presentation. Being that our social worker gave us all of the information on Tuesday night, this presentation didn’t really give us more details. With a ‘safely surrendered’ baby, there is very little information about the birth mother (or family for that matter) and little to no health information.

We were given a couple of photos of Rylee, but photos don’t do her justice! We wanted to take her home that day, but because she was currently at a foster home, we were told that we needed to take 24 hours to decide. Blah! We knew that she was ours, but since they wouldn’t let us take her home that day, we went power shopping! Target, Baby-R-Us, Costco… Since we had an age range of newborn to 2-years-old that we were open to, we haven’t been able to purchase many things until we knew the age. Car seats, clothing, strollers, etc.

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Thursday, September 12th is the day we first got to meet Rylee Joy (yes we got to name her and that is a whole other blog post coming soon)  and also bring her home! Here’s Hubs right before we put Rylee in our car!

We have been so blessed with great family and friends who have helped us with clothes, crib, bouncers, dinners, diapers, etc. The outpour of love for Rylee can not be contained in words.

We have also been blessed with some beautiful photography sessions by great friends. I will be posting more photos from these sessions soon. All of the photos (except of the one of Hubs outside of the county office) were shot by Ronni Lynn Photography.

I will try to resume regular posts soon. I have so much to share, nursery tour, working out and being a mamma, new attire line, and MAMA SHRED!!!