Baby!!

We arrived home from a weekend camping trip in the desert with a whole pile of Ahmed's colleagues late on Saturday afternoon. I was in the kitchen dealing with endless containers of wet soggy food when Ahmed called out from the study to come and see an email. What a life-changing email.

Dear Emma and Ahmed,
I had an interview with a biological mother, she has a baby girl born on February 29, she could not support this new child, she has 4 more children so she needs to give this baby for adoption, please let me know if you have all the paper and if you are interested to adopt this baby girl. Tomorrow I will have the HIV test of the baby and in one week all the other lab/test.
I will waiting for you response,
Best regards,
Aida

What followed was 24 hours of shock and disbelief. "...if you are interested to adopt this baby girl..." Those words have not stopped ringing in my head. I think I've been waiting 34 years and 4 months to adopt this baby girl and interested is the tip of the iceberg of emotions that convey how much I want to adopt her. Yes we are interested, we email back. We needed a few more emails back and forth with our lawyer in Tijuana before this could possibly be reality. Better yet, I needed our lawyer to email us every half hour just to say it's not a practical joke, and there is in fact, a baby girl, sleeping somewhere in Tijuana, waiting for us to come and love her and be her parents. But of course, she's not going to do that, and I just need to believe that this baby is real, and really can be ours. Wow. Slept about 3 hours last night. Kept waking up making lists of what to do now, and names?? and flight details and work and those crazy details that keep one up at night filling up my head.