Milestone Anniversary

One year ago today I was at work going CRAZY knowing that referrals had landed and were being announced across the message boards on-line. I just knew it was our day. Members or our travel group had been sending email messages back and forth all morning..."Did you get the call yet? No did you?" I can't remember who was the first to hear, but once I knew for sure the calls were coming to say that I was a bit anxious is a drastic understatement. I remember getting the call from the Social Worker that morning. It went something like this:

SW: "Hello Beth? This is Crossroads."
ME: "I've been waiting for your call!" (Immediate tears!)
SW: "You have? Well, I have a referral for you. You have a daughter!"
ME: "REALLY?"

I remember wanting to hear it again. REALLY? We have a daughter?! I couldn't believe it was finally happening for us! I tried my best to copy details...name, birthdate, province, etc., but I was pretty hysterical.
The call:

When I hung up with the agency, I called Ron right away:

ME: "Hi honey." (I tried so hard to speak calmly though I was crying and shaking on my end of the phone,)
RON: "Hi."
ME: "Guess what..."
RON: "What," he said as if he didn't know. He was gracious enough to let me say the next sentence.
ME: "We have a baby girl!"

That was all I could really get out. We made plans to leave work as soon as possible and meet to drive to the agency so we could at last see the pictures of our daughter. What a surreal moment. We spent part of the afternoon at Crossroads trying to absorb the basics. From there we went immediately to have copies made of the pictures for our parents and then we stopped at the Chinese restaurant we like to ask for some help with the pronunciation of Hope's name. That was sort of a funny moment. :) It was so cool to deliver our news to our parents that night. We were so excited to become parents and were already so in love with our little girl.
This was the first picture we saw that afternoon:

Our first glimpse:

Now, 1 year later, we are still so proud and excited to be Hope's parents and we just love her more with each day. I can't believe it has been a year since we first saw those big beautiful black eyes and cute little toes. I remember wanting so badly to pinch those toes. SO CUTE!

Please look back to our post here to see our referral announcement and all the pictures. This post is from one month later and sort of re-lives referral day as well. It has been a blast preparing this post and reading back over all the comments we received after Hope's referral. What a miracle this has all turned out to be.

Happy Referral Anniversary Hope (and all of CR Group 91). So many memories!

One year ago we were waking up and staring into the adorable eyes of a photograph. Today, this is what we get to wake up to:

(I apologize that the video is dark, but you still get the idea. We have one happy little girl.)