The Laird Lowdown: We're back from Vacation

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

We're back from Vacation

Now that we're back from vacation, there will (hopefully) be a flurry of posts. Figured I'd share some stuff from Jen and my night on the town in NYC. Beth and Pat bought Jen tickets to Wicked! for her birthday, and we went into town on Tuesday night to see it. We had dinner at a little hole in the wall Irish pub (no TGI Fridays this time for us!), and then went to the show (which was excellent).

Afterwards, we went across the street to this diner that Jen spotted to get some dessert. It had a sign that said "Home of the singing waitstaff". We figured it was just some cheesy thing, like when the staff at a chain restaurant gets together and half heartedly sings "Happy Birthday".

We couldn't have been more wrong. All of the wait staff are aspiring Broadway actors and actresses. They took turns belting out showtunes and other music all night long. I got a quick video of one waitress doing (fittingly) one of the songs from "Wicked!"

If you watch the related videos, most of them are of other waiters and waitresses from the diner. Ryan, our waiter, does a Barry Manilow song that is absolutely hilarious.

We knew we wanted to take a cab back to the train station--we walked up to the theater, but needed to get off our feet. A guy driving a bike rickshaw pulled up to the curb, and I figured "Why not?" I haggled him from $25 to $20 (I only had $20 cash on me), and he biked us all the way back to the station. Our path took us right through the middle of Times Square--going through Times Square on a bike is an interesting experience, to say the least. I was able to get a pretty poorly lit picture of us being deftly manuevered through NYC cab traffic.

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Our Adoption Story

Everyone always wants to know our adoption story. It is a long and complicated affair, but the short of it goes like this:

Tim and I decided after long discussion to build a family through adoption. Any children we adopted would be ours but just not have his eyes, or my hair… Anyway, we started our adoption journey on September 11, 2003 in an international program to Thailand.

In late February of 2005 we received word that the Thai government had turned down our request. We were devastated. We began looking into other options. We turned to domestic adoption.

A girl at Aquinas, where I work, had a friend who was looking to find an adoptive home for her baby. We decided to go ahead and find out more about her. We then got news that she was pregnant with twin boys. Oh my… what to do? So after talking and praying we decided if that was what God meant for us, then that was great.

So we talked with her and it was progressing toward us having twins. Unfortunately, the mother went into premature labor and one of the boys was still born and the other boy was very sick. The mother wanted to keep him, which was fine with us, since to voluntarily give up a child is one thing, but to have one taken from you is another.

After much sorrow, we again started over. We had our portfolio looked at by a bunch of birth parents, but nothing came of it, so we waited… and waited… and waited. Until one day I was getting out of a meeting and my telephone rang at work. It was the social worker calling about a birth family. Finally we had been chosen. That was Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

The only downside was the baby would be here any minute, literally. The birth mother had come in on her due date to make an adoption plan… oh my, again! We said that yes of course we’d take the baby, so in a mad dash, we finished paperwork, bought out Babies R Us, and made many phone calls to parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, and the list went on.

It was Tuesday when we got the call and by Sunday, September 24th, we were a wreck, so we went to church. After church we had to do a little more shopping to get ready and so we stopped for lunch at Taco Bell. A familiar face jumped out of the crowd at Tim, it was the pregnancy counselor, Emily. He saw that she was talking on her phone and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if she was talking about our baby?” I think I answered that it would be “scary, not funny.” So he went over to say hi. Well, it turns out he was right. She was talking to the birth mother; she had just gone into labor.

At around 7pm that evening we got to meet our little miracle, our Kaylee. Two days later we got to take her home to a house that was full of people waiting to hold her and even more people waiting to come over to the house to hold her. On, June 13, 2007, Kaylee Raquel Elaina Laird became officially ours and we are so happy to finally have an “official” complete family.