Monday, January 21, 2013

24 hours down, 24 to go

all night i couldn't sleep - again. i just kept turning on my phone to stare at that picture. i'm serious. all night long i laid there looking at that little face. those cheeks. but friday morning eventually came and  that's when we got word that Nyla's birth mom wanted to meet us before signing her termination of rights documents on Saturday morning.

See, once a mom makes a decision to place her child up for adoption, she has 72 hours to change her mind. This is why, once she decided to do it on wednesday, she had until saturday to change her mind. in many cases, instead of signing all the paperwork and then having three days to change their mind, they have birth parents wait the three days and then sign the papers at the very last hour of the three day mark. That is why Nyla's birth mom was signing her termination of rights paperwork on saturday instead of right when she decided to do it on Wednesday.

This made for a unique situation. Since Nyla was born on Sunday, December 16 she was only permitted to stay in the hospital until Thursday due to some weird rules at University Hospital downtown, even though the adoption wouldn't go through until Saturday, December 22. Most hospitals  don't mind keeping babies past the usual discharge time period if there is a gap in time until papers can be signed. not UH. On Thursday afternoon we got word that UH was discharging Nyla so our agency was sending a social worker from Columbus to pick her up and take her a foster family that they use for situations such as this - a foster family in Columbus.

it broke our heart to  know that our girl was going from being 10 minutes away (although we couldn't see her) to 2.5 hours away until Saturday. Luckily this foster mom was raved about and we knew she would be in good hands until she was in ours.

All that to say, the plan was to meet birth mom at Panera Bread for an hour, and then she'd stay there with her social worker to sign the papers and we'd head to Columbus to pick up the baby. That way, if something went amiss and she did change her mind at the very last possible moment, we wouldn't be that far into our journey south. We knew that was a possibility, but we prayed it wouldn't be the case.

Still, it seemed like a lot of pressure to meet her. Although she had chosen us from the stack of bios she was given to review, she said he wanted to meet us before she signed to make sure we weren't crazy.

all along we've wanted as open an adoption as a birth mom was willing to have. Meeting her just seemed like a natural step in our desire for openness. But naturally i don't mean stress-free. I still couldn't eat, or sleep. I knew i would have to keep really busy those last 24 hours or i'd go crazy...


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