We are proud parents of our little girl, Evelyn.

We started our adoption process with Adoption STAR. We attended classes, special events and pursued private-track adoption. I’ll start our story about mid-way through our process. It had been 12 months since our home study had been completed. We had just a couple profiling opportunities only to end in disappointment. It was July 4th week and Tony and I had taken this week off. Tony was painting the baby’s room and I was re-doing our profile.

The weather was great, so I decided to take my laptop outside to work on our profile. I looked up to see a blue heron fly over. Then, I was surprised to hear him vocalize. He flew low and right above me. It was our Stork! I ran inside to tell Tony that our baby was just delivered. I did not know exactly what that meant but I felt she was already promised to us.

About 8 months had passed. I thought about our adoption process several times a day for close to 2 years. But during the past 8 months, many of those thoughts were about my ‘stork’ sighting. I was convinced that March would be our month! Would we be matched? Maybe we would bring our baby home in March! On March 9, Adoption STAR told me about a Birth Mom. For the next couple of days, I thought about her and all the reasons this was a perfect match. Even though we had not been chosen, I told Tony that we needed to finally pick out a name for our little girl. I was out of town, so Tony had sent me an e-mail with baby names and their meanings. He sent me the meaning of Evelyn – it was my grandmother’s name but also meant “waited for child”. At that moment, I felt like she was ours. The next morning, we received a call from Adoption STAR. Birth Mom had chosen us!

We had 2 weeks before Evelyn was due, but Birth Mom said she could ‘go any day’. She was right. She went into labor 2 days later. Evelyn was born on the 14th of March. The next day, we went to the hospital to meet our Birth Mom and our daughter, Evelyn.

When Tony and I walked into the room, I think our hearts stopped. There was our Birth Mom waiting for us, holding Evelyn in her arms. We could never have imagined a more beautiful baby. That day, I told our Birth Mom about my ‘stork’ story….and Evelyn arrived 9 months later.