Let me start by saying that my husband and I didn’t make our decision to adopt lightly. After years of struggling with unknown infertility and four failed invitro procedures, we thought we had to close that chapter of our lives and move on. After grieving the idea of not having a biological child, we started talking about adoption. We decided that we just wanted to be parents and it didn’t matter how it was going to happen.
After doing our homestudy we waited for about nine months and the call finally came that we had been picked by a birthmother and birth father. The baby was a boy and she was due in about a month. We couldn’t believe it we were so excited our dreams of becoming parents are finally coming true. We had a few meetings with the birth parents before the baby was born. There were so many emotions involved but overall the four of us hit it off and are now bonded for life. Everyone was anxious for the healthy baby boy to be born.
We got the call on a Sunday evening that the birth mother was in labor. We rushed to the hospital and waited. Minutes after the baby was born the doctor and birth grandmother came to talk to us and said they had bad news. The doctor was very blunt and said “the baby was deformed , his jaw is inverted and he is missing an ear.” We rushed to be by his side and walked with the nurses to the NICU. As we walked we stared at him. I was thinking he looks perfect other than he is missing an ear. It was 3 o’clock a.m. so we had to wait hours for the doctors to make their rounds in the morning. We sat with him, cried, prayed and just anxiously waited for answers.
When the doctor was doing his rounds and came in that morning he couldn’t have been more calm and reassuring to us that our son was just missing his ear and part of his jaw bone. We now know this is called microtia and hemifacial microsomia. When we talked to our social worker that morning she told us it wasn’t too late if we wanted to change our minds and that there are couples that said they would take special needs kids. That thought never crossed our minds the second he was born he was the baby we had prayed for all those years.
Our son, Cash is now four years old. It has been an emotional rollercoaster since the day he was born, between doctor appointments for different things , two procedures, one surgery and a couple surgeries that he still needs . We also him drive him back and forth 45 minutes each way everyday to preschool that he has attented since he was 18 months . His school is a great place he attends with other hearing impaired kids.
Cash will start kindergarten in the fall of 2017. We wouldn’t change one thing about our adoption story. Cash is the sweetest, brightest, most fun kid we could ever ask to raise. He is also a great big brother to his baby brother, Coen, who we also adopted through LFCS. We are so thankful thankful to LFCS for helping us on our journey to becoming a family
Casey, Candi, Cash & Coen