The Laird Lowdown: Merry Christmas, and wake me after New Years!

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Merry Christmas, and wake me after New Years!

We're back in Grand Rapids now. I can't remember ever having a trip to my parents that was both so fun and so incredibly exhausting. When we weren't chasing around after 3 toddlers, we were either eating or playing Wii. Kevin pretty much ruled, but Jen took him down a notch by cleaning his clock with bowling on Sunday night.

The trip back was uneventful, if a little frightning at times--the winds really kicked up when we got into Michigan. The fun started when we got home--Jen's boss's daughter house sat for us. She had one of our spare keys, and her mom had the other. Unfortunately, we don't actually have two spare keys--I put mine in our super secret extra key location just in case they needed it. So we got home and had no key to the house. I had to climb in through a window.

Then (and we didn't realize this until later), we found that we had water in the basement. I think all of the snow melt and rain was too much for our ground to handle. Thankfully it isn't too bad, and there's really nothing of value that got wet. I'd much rather have some water in the basement than have the roof ice dam up again--the roof seemed to come out fine.

I picked out a Christmas picture from each kid to share; we may post more in the weeks to come.

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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.