Life with our two boys was very busy and due to Connor's special needs and the time required to take care of him Mike and I realized that our plate was more than full although we had a deep desire for more children. I think that my heart longed for a little girl but I knew that my boys needed alot of me so when our infertility doctor phoned indicating that we had frozen embryos remaining that we needed to use Mike and I were once again in a position of thinking about adding a another child to our family. We chose to move forward with another IVF procedure using our frozen embryos only this time we chose to use a surrogate. She was a beautiful woman who desperately wanted to give us the gift of a biological child but once again our efforts were unsuccessful. However, God was at work in His plan for it was through the attorney we used to facilitate our contract with our surrogate that we met our daughter's birth mom. Shortly after our failed attempt of trying to conceive through the surrogate our attorney met with a woman who was pregnant. This woman was in her late 40's, married with 2 grown children and was just not in a position financially or emotionally to raise a child. She expressed some specifics as to what she was looking for in an adoptive couple all of which described our family perfectly. Although, we had not been formal with our requests to adopt again our attorney wanted to give us consideration because we matched this birth mom's requests so nicely so she called and as with our boys we knew this was God once again reaching out and offering us another gift of a child and we of course said yes and then later discovered that our baby was a girl. The wait was long and like Cody's process there was little to no contact with the birth mom, in fact we didn't even meet her before the birth. This attorney had a very busy adoption practice facilitating many adoptions including quite a few celebrity adoptions therefore we just didn't get alot of the personal attention we received with Cody and Connor's adoptions.
The phone call came letting us know that our daughter had arrived on Sept. 13, 2002 and we prepared the following day to drive a couple of hours south of our home to the hospital to bring her home. The next day we hurriedly left our home forgetting our cell phone and began our drive. Excitedly we chatted about our baby girl trying to decide on her name. We arrived at the hospital, waiting for what seemed like an eternity and finally called our attorney's associate at her home where she was celebrating a Jewish Holiday with her family. She informed us that she had been trying to get in touch with us to let us know that we weren't going to get to take our daughter home due to some difficulties that the birth mom was having with some hospital bills so we should just go home and we would try to deal with it later in the week. Well, my husband wouldn't accept that...he promptly called her back asked for the birth mom's name, called up to her room and told her we were in the hospital and asked if we could come up. She was overjoyed as she was frustrated with the attorney's lack of helpfulness with the hospital administration and wanted us to be able to take our daughter home that day. Mike worked out all the details with the hospital, paid her bills and we had a priceless visit with our daughter's birth mom and birth dad. It was at that moment we decided that her name would be Grace. Cody would later give her the name Grace Elisabeth so that her initials would be GEM. Watching the woman who had given birth to my daughter leave the hospital room that day was one of the hardest things I have ever witnessed. She loved Grace deeply yet made a sacrificial decision to give Grace a life and a hope of a future filled with happiness in our family and each day I spend with Grace I think of my responsibility to her birth mom in making sure that Grace has every opportunity to become the woman God created her to be.
