Open Adoption Round Table #27 "First Meeting"

Every parent has their own unique story of meeting their child for the first time. Maybe it was in the hospital room where you got to witness your child breathe their first breath. Maybe you sat in a waiting until someone came to whisk away to a room where your child was waiting. Maybe you sat at your agency anxiously awaiting your new baby to arrive. Or maybe, surrounded by strangers sipping their lattes, you walked into a Starbucks and first layed eyes on your precious child.

Yep. The latter was us! 


I think back to driving up to the building and trying to peer in the overly glared windows just waiting to get my first glimpse of our daughter. It was packed. I wondered what the people exiting the store thought about us walking in with an empty car seat.  As we pulled the door open I got so nervous. I scanned the room quickly looking for the sw and the baby. Finally I saw the sw tucked into a corner and as she saw me she smiled and reached to pick our daughter up out of her car seat. As she picked her up and we saw her for the first time and I swear the heavens opened. The music started. And then right before we started to say our first hello's a  man walking by chimed in with a "Wow, that's a beautiful baby! How old is she?!" Pretty much jetting his head between us and the baby! I don't remember what I said to him, but I'm pretty sure flames came shooting out of my eyeballs! Dude! This is our moment buddy... go away! LOL!

The first one to hold Lovebug was my Hubby. This in and of itself was monumental, since as his rule, he never held itty bitty babies. She was so small in his arms and so absolutely beautiful. As we peered at our daughter for the first time, examining her hands, kissing her tiny face, that overly crowed small Starbucks could have been empty for all we knew. It was love at first sight. The only people who existed in that moment was the 3 of us. Somehow we managed to pay enough attention to sign some paperwork, although it wasn't without a few "wait, can you repeat that?" questions. We spent a little more time going over the hospital discharge info and how things would go from here(since we had to wait out a revocation period) and then S, the sw, said "well, time for me to get going!". *gulp* Wow, this was really happening! After we said our goodbyes to her and she walked out of the restaurant I remember thinking how surreal it was to just be left with the baby. I mean I knew that's what would happen and obviously what we wanted to happen, but when it happened it was just so surreal.

We kinda just stared at each other for a second and then fumbled around with packing up all the little baby things that we weren't yet used to. After we got things together we buckled Lovebug in her new seat, snapped a picture of her to send to all of our anxious family members and walked out of the Starbucks, but this time with a full seat!

As we drove away we both broke down. All the years we waited, all that we wanted was finally sitting in our back seat. To say we were happy is an understatement. Our first meeting with our daughter was totally unconventional, totally awesome and a great story to share when we want to mix things up a little :)

Oh and the picture in my header is of that day! Notice the cup just to my right? Yeah, no big deal...

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