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Nikolai Denmark's avatar

So Chloe and I have explained this elsewhere in some version or other, but we essentially adopted a newborn with no notice. We matched 9/10/19 with a birth mom who was due in mid-October. Planned a trip up to SD from OK to meet her briefly at the end of September and then have a few weeks to get things in order at home. Certainly not the same as having nine months to mentally and physically prepare, but 5-6 weeks is something anyways.

Drove to Omaha and stayed at my mom's one night, the plan for the next day was to drive to Pierre, have lunch with birth mom and agency rep, then turn around and stay in Sioux Falls that night. Back to Tulsa the next day. Two nights, three days of driving in service of a lunch at Perkins, but it was going to be worth it.

About 40 minutes out of Pierre on our way up, we get a call, birth mom had a OB appointment that morning and they'd decided they were going to induce that night. I don't remember what the reasoning was for the early exit, but it wasn't super-duper worrisome on its own. What was worrisome was suddenly being in SD with three days worth of warm weather clothing (extra day of clothes to be prepared, right?), the "small" vehicle, precisely zero baby stuff in hand, and an indefinite stay in South Dakota staring us in the face.

Between calling workplaces, calling soon-to-be grandparents, and rearranging hotel reservations on the fly (turns out some hunting season or other starts 10/1 in SD, and all the hotels in Pierre suddenly fill up to capacity), we had to come to terms with having no prep time at all. Also the Perkins was closed for remodeling so that was a bummer.

24 hours of waiting and bouncing between the hotel and hospital and watching Gameday in Lincoln for the first time in years and for some reason the Huskers didn't even play a game that night (cit.needed) and suddenly Chloe was texting me from the delivery room where she was holding our son.

Thence followed a couple more nights in Pierre and three weeks in Sioux Falls (it has a Target!) waiting for permission to leave the state without it being considered trafficking.

In the meantime, one of our neighbors had a spare key and had been checking our front patio for deliveries while we were gone. The good people of the internet sent us something like $5k worth of baby gear while we were gone. Filled the living room from top to bottom.

I don't know why I'm typing this all out aside from some mild attention-whoring I guess, but those three weeks stuck in a Hampton Inn "suite" with an actual factual newborn, trotting him down to the lobby to watch football on TV in a different room from time to time, exploring a bunch of touristy crap in Sioux Falls that I'd never have seen otherwise, just having him around 24-7 was the scariest, most stressful, most joyful time in my life. Kids are great.

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Michael's avatar

People are like trees; every year a new ring of growth on the outside, but all the previous years are still there on the inside. We're just a little bit bigger and studier, with all the same branches and scars as the year before.

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