Adoption Chronicles- Labor and Delivery, pt. 1

Induction is scheduled to begin around 10:00 tonight (eastern time zone). Please pray, pray, pray for a quick and smooth delivery!

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 11

Who knew this back story would have so many parts to it! We thought we'd be writing about an actual baby by now. So sorry to disappoint you with more back story when you're all so eagerly awaiting news of her arrival, but we want to at least post something in the mean time!

After our first night of sleep in NY, the first couple of days were mostly spent hanging out with Melissa's parents (our gracious hosts for the next ? weeks). We did some shopping, saw some movies (2 thumbs up for Avatar in IMAX 3-D), ate out, played Wii, etc. On Wednesday morning our birthparents took us to the George Eastman House. (George Eastman was the founder of the Eastman Kodak company). We enjoyed a tour of the house and got a kick out of seeing all of the old cameras in the museum. Wednesday was baby's due date so I think we were all hoping that walking around the house and museum might spur on some action, but alas the day came and went with no baby. Later that afternoon Melissa was able to accompany the birthparents and grandma to her OB appointment. All seemed well and an ultrasound was scheduled for the next day.

That evening both birthparents' families came over to the house for a delicious dinner prepared by Melissa's mom. It was a beautiful evening of fellowship and getting to know some of the members of the families that we hadn't had a chance to meet yet.

The next Day Melissa and her mom were given the opportunity to be present for the ultrasound. Though it was exiting to see pictures of the baby in person, we were really wishing to just see the real thing!

iPhone App "Let's Golf" FREE! Today only

For those of you iPhone/Touch users who like to have a game or two around, today's your lucky day. Check the link below to download a free golf game good today only. It's a sizeable download, so consider using the computer you sync your phone with to download. Enjoy!

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/free-stuff/980860/

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 10

Fortunately we'd decided ahead of time to split our trip up into two days. David's mom and dad offered to meet us for the night at a hotel just off the turnpike in Ohio. We enjoyed dinner together at a nearby Greek family restaurant (the only one in town). Then we spent the remainder of the evening hanging out at the hotel watching Allie do things like this:








The next morning we enjoyed our continental breakfast together before loading back up and hitting the road again. Here are David and his parents with Allie before our departure.

When we got back on the turnpike we stopped to collect our ticket for the toll road and lo and behold the IPass was working. So for the remainder of our trip we were able to drive on the tollway "hassle free".

Day two of our drive seemed to go a lot faster than day one. Granted it was fewer hours on the road, but those hours seemed to pass a lot faster. I got a lot of use out of David's iPhone, making frequent updates to Facebook and enjoying the various apps he'd downloaded. I also made up a game to play with David where I chose a song on my ipod and awarded him 5 points if he could name the artist and 10 points if he could name the title of the song. This was great entertainment for quite some time until he got to about 275 points and realized he didn't know what the points were good for. We're still negotiating the terms of my point system, but I did award him a point for every mile driven on this trip (nearly 1000 so far), and promised 100 points/wet diaper and 500 points/poopy diaper. For some reason that doesn't seem to entice him at all!

We arrived at Mom and Dad's house just before dinner. Later that evening our birthparents stopped over to see us and say hello. I think we all breathed a sigh of relief that we'd made it in time, and the baby was officially given clearance to come any time now.

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 9

Let me preface this post by explaining that David and I hate road trips... a lot. Any distance over two hours is too long for us. However, we love our dog... a lot. Knowing that we'd be gone a minimum of 2 weeks, probably longer, we just couldn't see ourselves leaving her behind for that long. So we made the ultimate sacrifice and in saying yes to our beagle Allie, we said yes to an 18 hour drive in December. Like I said, we really love our dog.

We left the house around 6:30 Saturday morning. After quick stops for Caribou, breakfast, and gas, we were on our way. The roads weren't great for the first couple of hours but they were "good enough." Once the sun rose it made travel a little more challenging as it produced an awful glare on the wet roads for quite a while. We crossed into Illinois just before noon and our first stop was at a Road Ranger gas station to purchase an IPass. As soon as we returned to the car I called the 800 number on the box to register our unit. After all, the whole reason we purchased it was to drive on the toll road with greater ease. After being on the phone with Jerod (with the emphasis on the -od) (I don't mean he was odd; the emphasis really was on the -od of his name) for about 20 minutes, he concluded that we couldn't actually use the IPass since we didn't have permanent plates on our Outlook yet. (Remember we'd only taken posession of our vehicle just days before this trip). I could give him the plates for our Neon and that got things moving a little until I reminded him that we weren't presently driving the Neon. The number on our temporary plates had a different amount of characters than he could type into his system so he really couldn't help us. However, he did assure us that we could go ahead and use it and then once our permanent plates arrived we could call back and they would credit us any fees we'd been charged for using an invalid IPass. Well enough... I wrote down his name, and we decided to give it a shot. Except for the next toll booth we approached wouldn't raise the gate for us so we still had to shell out the $3.00 cash anyway. We gave up and just paid cash for the remaining tolls through and around Chicago.

The weather going through Chicago got horrible, by the way...

We were bound and determined to make the most of the situation and reward ourselves with Portillos hot dogs for lunch. And even though it took us entirely too long to find one "along the way", we did in fact get our Portillos for lunch. Yes, we inhaled them since our dog was waiting for us in the Outlook during somewhat of a blizzard, but we did get our Portillos hot dogs.

By 4:20 we'd hit the half-way point for our trip. 499 miles down, 497 to go. For some reason this wasn't that encouraging to us. After being on the road for so long, surely we must have been more than half-way there!

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 8

Melissa's last day of school was Tuesday, December 22nd. From that point on, she was ready to be in New York. She'd been given the rare invitation to be present and witness the birth of our first child and did not want to miss out on this opportunity. An 18 hour drive stood between her and our soon-t0-be-daughter.

However, being Director of Worship Arts for our church, David had a lot of responsibility with the Christmas eve services and really wasn't free to get away until those were completed. Not a huge problem; the baby wasn't due until the 30th. So we'd planned to just leave Christmas morning for our two day journey to New York.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the week, the weather reports were looking bleak. They were calling for "The Worst Blizzard since Halloween of '91." Reports were predicting possibly up to 2 feet of snow in parts of Minnesota between Tuesday and Saturday. Great! It would keep us from getting on the road, and once we finally did, it would travel the whole way to NY with us. Super!

Many well-intentioned friends advised us to leave early and beat the storm. Easier said than done. David couldn't exactly just abandon the Christmas eve services without reason to believe that our baby was coming early. We resolved ourselves to just stick it out and trust that God would continue to be in the details of our adoption. He'd certainly taken care of things this far... why on earth would he stop short of this?

The snow came... and came... and came... Christmas morning we woke up to rain. Huh! We weren't exactly expecting that. The good thing was that we got about an inch of rain instead of 10 inches of snow. The bad news was that the inch of rain on the 6 inches of snow that was already in our driveway made for very difficult clearing. The snowblower couldn't handle the slush and our backs couldn't handle the weight of the snow in our shovels. David pulled a muscle in his back pretty bad trying to sling snow over the already tall mounds and had to go in to apply heat. Melissa kept at it, feeling as though it was the one thing standing in her way of getting on the road. Must - get - out - of - the - driveway!

Christmas Eve 2009

Adoption Chronicles- The back story, pt. 7

We started thinking about trading in one of our vehicles last spring. Both were about the same age and were getting a little old, (nine and 10 years). The debate was which one to trade. Do we trade in the truck, the older of the two, that we could still get a little bit of cash for in a trade, or do we replace the Neon, which is 9 years but having it's share of issues? Car shopping has always been one of David's least favorite things. He prides himself in always being able to buy the best-of-the-best for the bargain basement price. This is really difficult to do when shopping for a car. We looked pretty seriously for about a month or so, but never found the deal we were willing to fall off the log for. We seemed frozen in our ability to make a decision. So... we didn't make one.

There came a point however when God pushed us off that log we'd been balancing on for so long. We no longer needed to decide which vehicle to replace. He made that very evident to us when David got rear-ended, resulting in a totaled Expedition. Fortunately, even though David was transporting 3 other church staff members, no one was injured. In the end, we received more money from our insurance settlement for the truck than we would have gotten if we'd traded it in. Also, it saved us the anguish of having to decide for ourselves between our two vehicles. One was totalled... done. I guess we'll replace that one. We could no longer drag out our search for a new vehicle indefinitely. The discomfort of having to share one vehicle would force us to make our decision in a timely fashion. (However some very generous friends shared their extra vehicle with us during the interim, allowing us to be slightly particular and not desperate in our search).

We ended up finally choosing a 2007 Saturn Outlook which was purchased for us at auction in Florida. The problem was that it was in Florida and needed to find its way to Minnesota in time for our big road trip. It was a bit of a risk, knowing that if baby decided to show up early, we may have to make the trip before the Outlook arrived. However, all was well when we picked up our new (used) car on Tuesday evening (22nd), and were planning on leaving Friday morning (25th). Just in the nick of time.

Adoption Chronicles- The back story, pt. 6

Realizing that our time being a family of only 2 was limited, there were a few things that we knew we needed to accomplish before we were joined by another family member. Ever since we purchased our home in August '08 we have had a huge to-do list. Staining the cedar siding rose to the top of that list. I guess we thought that we'd have all the time in the world, but suddenly this became super high on our priorities and a great urgency was felt. Day after day, every spare moment was spent outside slinging a paint brush, even when temperatures were down around 40. Our incredible friends gave of themselves and their time to come help us until the job was done (for the most part).



In addition to doing work on the outside of the house, preparations took place on the inside to make room for baby. David got quite friendly with Craigslist over the next couple of months trying to sell just about anything that wasn't nailed down in the baby's room. Black Friday sales enabled us to get awesome nursery furniture at an even more awesome price. (Would you expect anything less from David?) The furniture arrived before the rush came for Christmas Eve planning and other holiday events, and our friend Bryan came over to help with the assembly. Over the time of one afternoon, our guest room became a nursery.



From day one in meeting with our social worker, she strongly encouraged us to hold off on baby showers until after we brought baby home. Many people asked what the plan was for baby showers, and we just said we'll cross that bridge when she gets here I guess. (Which did seem quite strange to say to people who were looking to help organize a party to give us things.) Still, there were a few cards that arrived with gift cards to Babies-R-Us & a few other stores to help us get ready for the first few weeks with baby. A couple of recent moms also gifted us many of the clothes that their girls had grown out of, and they are just adorable.


Also, mom & dad Gafford showed up at our door with a car seat for our trip our to New York. They even showed me how to install it, so we were ready to roll. (Or so we thought...)

Adoption Chronicles- The back story, pt. 5

We started working with our adoption agency quite heavily over the next couple of months. We read several books on adoption and parenting and attended many meetings and seminars at their office. There were so many questions to ask on so many topics that we didn’t know where to start.

Many of the books that we read were a great help in us understanding the process we were embarking upon. We read about adoptions both closed and open and how they have been handled throughout the years. We knew given the circumstances of our adoption this far, it was certainly going to be of the open variety and it was exciting to learn about all of the advantages that would come with that. Through the process however, we also discovered the misconceptions that are out there about open adoptions and we found that educating our friends and family (in addition to ourselves!) would be key.

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 4

Our New York visitors arrived a couple of weeks later and we had a wonderful weekend getting to know each other. They spent plenty of time hanging out at the Mall of America and we cooked many of our favorites for them. We showed them most aspects of our lives, including the church and school. They were able to sit in on a service and hear David lead worship. David and I were already scheduled to sing a duet that week, which ended up bringing them to tears, feeling as though that song was meant just for them. Maybe it was, but we hadn’t literally chosen the song for them. It really just fit the service thematically! They also had the unique opportunity to meet with a friend of ours who had adopted three times, and (with the help of our agency) a birthmother who ironically had placed her child with our same friend. This enabled them to see both sides of a successful adoption story and ask any questions that they had. At the end of the weekend, the birthparents sent their mothers off for a while and shared with us that they’d made the decision to place their baby for adoption and asked if we’d be willing to adopt. Thrilled, yet still slightly guarded, we accepted.

The next four months were spent continuing to learn about adoption, completing our home study, and nurturing the new relationship that we’d begun with these two people who were making the most selfless decision I could imagine.

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 3

Meanwhile, the majority of our friends only knew that we were starting the adoption process. We had only let just a couple of friends in on the NY possibility so that they could offer their prayer support. Later that same week I received a text message from our dear friend Laurel in Michigan. Like most other friends, Laurel only knew that we were beginning the process. Her text message read “You have a precious baby girl in your near future.” I texted back “Would you like to elaborate?” She responded “What’s to elaborate on? You’re getting a baby girl very soon!” I called her and asked where this was coming from and she explained that she’d spent some time in prayer for our adoption that morning and three things became very clear to her. The first was that our adoption was not going to take as long as we think it will. Most adoptions take a couple of years or more, and ours was not going to take that long. The second thing was that our baby was already on its way. It’s already been created and is less than 9 months away. The third thing (enter her disclaimer because she knew we’d think she was crazy) was that the baby was a girl. She didn’t know why, but she was just positive on all three of these things. I then confessed to her our big secret about the possibility that we had been pursuing in New York, complete with the slipped announcement of the baby being a girl. For the first time since we’ve known her, Laurel was speechless. (Just kidding Laurel, we love you!). If we needed any more confirmation that God’s hand was in this adoption, this was it.

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 2

I decided to write a letter to this young pregnant girl with an enormous decision ahead of her. Instead of approaching it with the I-hope-we-get-to-adopt-her-baby mentality, I chose to do what I could to share our story, as a couple who has chosen to adopt. I knew she had a laundry list of fears, anxieties, and unknowns regarding adoption, and although it was new territory for us as well, I thought it might be good for her to at least hear that most people who are looking to adopt are really just good people who want to be parents more than anything. We corresponded a little back and forth over the next couple of months and in August she made the decision that she wanted to meet us face-to-face.

Plans took root for both birthparents and their mothers to fly to Minnesota for a weekend to get to know us. We were excited about the possibility that this offered but still remained guarded. We’d already experienced so much disappointment in our venture towards parenthood, we had to protect our hearts. While on the phone with the birthmother’s mom discussing the coming trip she offered to tell me the gender of the baby. Though I wanted to know, I knew that knowing would make it more difficult to distance myself, so I opted to wait. Though later in the conversation, she slipped and used “her” describing the baby, I pretended I hadn’t heard.

Adoption Chronicles - The back story, pt. 1

After 6 years of trying to become parents, we made the decision this past spring to pursue domestic adoption. We had done some research, talked to friends, and had finally chosen the agency we would be working through. After filling out a preliminary application we were scheduled to attend our first informational meeting to find out what this process would entail. Two days before that meeting, something happened that couldn’t have been more unexpected.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and my parents called from NY where my dad pastors a Wesleyan church. Apparently that morning a woman from their congregation approached my mom and shared that her young daughter had become pregnant. Just a couple of weeks prior on Mother’s Day Sunday, this woman was sitting in church listening as my dad prayed for all of the mothers and the women who longed to be mothers, and felt the Holy Spirit tell her that this baby was to be a gift for the pastor’s daughter. Though she’d never met us or knew about our struggles or new decision to adopt, she then asked my mom if David and I would be interested in adopting her daughter’s baby. Flabbergasted, my mom told her she’d certainly ask us. As my mom shared this with me over the phone, I kept hearing this little voice in my head saying, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” However, I wasn’t about to close the door without at least peeking in.

Adoption Chronicles - Overview...

Howdy all!

This is an explanation of the series that we are starting here on the blog called the "Adoption Chronicles." Over the next series of posts, we will be telling the story of our road to parenthood. So, for those of you who are interested, tune in! For those of you who just want to hear about other Gafford happenings, just ignore the Chronicles and tune into the other posts. So, thus we begin...

Test, Test, 1, 2, 3...

Just checking settings between Twitter, Facebook, and the blog. :)

Backstage with the gang...

I'm sitting backstage with the worship team from this weekend, and we have egg bake, crackers & cheese, BBQ sausages, nacho dip, and so much more. A huge thanks to my loving wife Melissa who helped me get this all together over the past 3 weeks for the team. Also a special thanks to mom Gafford who helped with the prep during their recent visit to MN.

This weekend at church we are doing the experiential worship stations with tables all around the worship center, but I can't help but wonder if I was sitting in the crowd if my nose wouldn't lead me to the table backstage loaded with these goodies. We can worship God with food, right?!

Here's a pic of Pam enjoying the festivities... :) Thanks for all you do here at Five Oaks you great volunteers!

The baby furniture arrived on Sunday and David surprised me yesterday by building it during the day while I was at work. Special thanks goes out to Bryan for helping David! No real accessories yet to speak of, but the room is finally cleaned up, furniture assembled, and baby clothes put away in the dresser. I'm feeling more and more ready every day! (Which is good since she's due in 15 days!)

Classroom antics

This week in our Bible curriculum we've been learning about Queen Esther and how she was unselfish to risk her life by approaching the king to save the Jews. In their workbooks they were asked to write a letter to Esther to tell her ways that they can also be unselfish. One little girl wrote, "Dear Esther, I can be unselfish by when it's Christmas time I can ask for lots and lots of presents." I knelt down and told her that asking for lots and lots of presents sound like it's selfish not unselfish. We're trying to list ways to be UNselfish. She asked me what unselfish meant. I told her that unselfish is when you think of other's needs before your own. It's the opposite of selfish. She got this look on her face and said, "Oh. I've never done that before." I couldn't help but laugh and just suggested that it might be time to start trying.

Black Friday Deals

We took advantage of Black Friday and bought our nursery furniture today. This is a picture of the crib on display. There weren't any in the store so we'll still have to wait a week or two before the joys of assembling said furniture. Any volunteers to help?

Skype with the Kentucky Liddicks...

Following dinner with the Shivers this afternoon, we had an opportunity to skype with Melissa's family down in Kentucky over the webcam. Our nephew Brogan joined us today, and boy has he gotten big since we've seen him last. (I also think he looks alot like the E-Trade baby...) Allie was tormented by the family with offers of treats and walks that couldn't be fulfilled by those who promised, so we'll have to love on her a little extra tonight. :) Great to see the family even though we couldn't be with them over the holidays. How cool is technology? I give it two thumbs up.