Surprise!! We were ending our Christmas celebration with my mother when we got "the call". Our celebration with my family had been sweet and sad as my dear dad's love of the holiday made it even harder to miss him as we celebrated. The car was packed to head home and we began to notice buzzing and dinging from our phones. If you've tried to contact us when we're out of town you can attest to this fact - we typically ignore those dings and buzzes until we return home. However, the insistence of the dinging caused us to check things out and we noticed a familiar name popping up on both of our phones: Susan T. The beloved social worker who who walked us through the failed adoption this summer and with whom we had always hoped to finalize an adoption.
We immediately called her back and heard these words: "there is a baby girl who was born this morning, Mom has seen your profile book and wants to meet you. Where are you?" To which we replied: "we're in Iowa and we can come straight there." We loaded everyone in the car and began the drive towards home as Gabby was born fifteen minutes from our house and was waiting with her amazing first momma there to meet us.
This sweet girl has an amazing first momma who I was privileged to spend beautiful time with in the hospital, loving on Gabby. Those three days are a treasure for us and were the start of a relationship with her first momma that is a gift.
Consents were signed and we got to welcome Gabby home on the 29th of December. Remember the hotel room wait time for Eliana's adoption? Well, Gabby was born in our home state so that wait time didn't apply and we got to bring her home as soon as she was discharged.
Gabrielle means "God is my strength." in Hebrew. Carter is the middle name her first momma chose for her. We added the middle name Marie at finalization in honor of both of our paternal grandmothers.
She has three siblings who tell us almost daily that they are so thankful that Gabby is part of our family. They all love her dearly. Some of the love has to monitored a bit more carefully than others but our (not so little) family is complete. We couldn't be more thankful and amazed at the gifts that each of these kiddos are to our family.
Grandpa and Grandma meeting Gabby
Grammie and Gabby
The crew meeting Gabby for the first time
And the love that has to be well supervised.
