The Call...how it all went down.

Wow. What a week and a half. Last Monday was such a blur...I want to try and get down as many details as I can before I forget. Plus, reading the "We Got The CALL" blogs are always my faves...

Monday June 8, 2009
Every morning I wake up around 8-8:30am and my first thought is "I wonder if today will be The Day." But for some reason, I didn't think that last Monday. Every morning as The Esquire tells me goodbye he always jokes, "So call me if we get the referral"but for the first time in months he didn't say that. In fact, I didn't think about our adoption a single time until around 10am when I was checking Facebook and saw that both Harmony and Julie had their hopes that we'd get The Call today. My first thought on reading those: oh great, you just reminded me!

We had been in the #1 spot on the unofficial list for a week but weren't too excited about it because the family before us sat in that same spot for over a month. I wasn't in a sad, bitter mood but I did relish the few instances when I was able to forget we were waiting.

I had errands to run and ended up at Anthropology going through their sale stuff. My arms were full of 50% off white shirts in various styles ... cause you can never have to many white shirts... when my phone rang. As I have done for the last 3 months, I had the fleeting thought of "what if this is the call." But that was it... no chills or intuition. Even the number didn't jar me.

Notice my screen saver? :-)

"Hello?"
"Kat, it's Mary. Calling from Gladney." At which point she paused. Something I'm sure she's learned to do with these kind of calls.
"Are you kidding me?"
Mary starts laughing, "no, this is The Call you've been waiting for."
"Seriously. Are you kidding me?!"
I am so completely lost and confused and freaked that I just start jabbering away.
"Ok. Ok. OK. um, OK...so I need to call The Esquire. Yeah. I should call him. I'll call him and then I'll call you back. OK? Yeah, I'll call him and then I'll call you."

And then I hung up on her. I've been waiting for this call for 9.5 months and I hung up on her.

I see a salesgirl, hand her my armload of white shirts and declare with a wide-eyed look, "I'm sorry about the mess but my Adoption Consultant just called and I have a baby!" For the record, I have NEVER said the phrase 'adoption consultant' before in my life.

I walk to the front of the store and call The Esq at work. As he answers I try to think of a clever way to tell him the news. Here's what I came up with:

"Mary just called."
"Are you kidding me?" Apparently we are a one-note family.

We agree to meet at home so we can call Mary together.

Here's my favorite part of the story: I couldn't resist calling the Esquire again as soon as I got to my car...only to discover he was already driving out of his parking garage. Here's the thing that cracks me up-- I only had to walk across a little sidewalk and up 2 flights to get to my car. But he had to close down his computer, gather his stuff, tell his partner that he was leaving for the day, take an elevator down 53 flights and then another elevator down 3 flights and then wait for the parking guys to hand him his keys and yet somehow, he STILL managed to get on the road before me. Do you think he was excited?

In the end, of course, I got home before he did. Not knowing what to do with myself, I changed shirts 3 times. What do you wear to meet your kids for the first time?!?! I also set up the little video camera so we could save The Call for posterity. It's hilarious...not that flattering but I wouldn't give it up for the world. I also will not be sharing it with the world.

I called Mary to let her know we would call her back for details in about 1/2 an hour when The Esq got home. I told her how surreal it felt to know that tonight we would go to bed knowing who our children were. And that The Esq. thought it was crazy to realize this was our LAST 30 minutes of NOT knowing who our children were. She laughed in this odd way that made me think, "hmmm, it wasn't supposed to be funny."

Finally! The Esquire arrives! I'm sitting on the front step waiting for him. He asks, "any last guesses what it will be?" Inside I'm feeling that it's going to be two but I don't say that out loud so if I'm wrong he won't worry that I'm disappointed.

Mary and The Esquire make small talk for a moment about the traffic and then finally she says, "So, I'm not sure what you already know...Kat I've heard you say "children" a lot..."

Now here's an interesting thing...I remember this moment completely different then the video shows it actually happened. I remember thinking "how would we know anything?" In my memory we are both sitting there like "huh?" But on the video my eyes grow wide and my hand shoots up to my mouth in surprise. So apparently even if my mind had no idea what she was inferring, my body did. Mary then says that life changing sentence:

"...we have twins. Two months old. A boy and a girl. Twins."

It's the moment you wait for and dream about but no amount of blog reading can prepare you for what that moment is really like. We just laughed and shook and kept reaching for each other's hands. Amazing. It was amazing. When Mary went to give us details the only piece of paper I could find was a little scrap that had Julie's children's names written on it.

When we hung up we just sit there. Drinking it in... Twins. We had wanted siblings but had basically been told point blank it wouldn't happen. And yet...Twins. It happened.

We call our families living in the US with the good news first. We have to wait 5 hours until it's 7am in Muscat, Oman to call The Esquire's sister and her family. Our 9 yr old nephew answers the phone and says his mom is out running. Damn her healthy lifestyle! We impatiently wait another 45 mins and then call them again. Our 7 yr old nephew gets on the phone and asks, "did you get The Call?"

On speaker phone sharing the crazy good news with loved ones.

We make 3-4 more calls to special people--reactions vary from "I KNEW it would be today" to huge massive sobbing that causes husbands to come running in fear. One friend calls us back and is screaming so loudly in the phone that I can't actually tell who it is so I just make polite small talk for 5 mins until she calls down and her voice becomes recognizable.

Then we run over to tell our good friends who live close by--they are the only people we get to tell in person. On the way over I tell The Esquire to "play it cool, act like we are just dropping by, no big deal." But within .5 seconds of seeing them in the back yard I thrust the picture of the twins at them. Patty's reflexes kick in and cause her to start crying but you can tell she doesn't exactly know why. Her husband Loren looks like this, only it's from Happiness and Shock rather than fear and aftershave.
And their son, Super Max, looks at the twins with interest for a few minutes and then asks if we want him to cook us a play-dough dinner to celebrate. We say yes.

Back at home I remember the Referral Gift I have had hidden in my closet for over a year. Of course I'm too excited to save it for a Father's Day gift...I have to give it to The Esq. NOW!

ok, so it's a size 2T...and by now the Strand probably has 22 miles of books...but still, isn't it cute?

And that night not only did we go to bed knowing who our children were, but we also got to go to bed clutching their photos.

xoxo-Kat, mom to twins