I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. - 1 Samuel 1:27

After more than two years of waiting, we are overjoyed to announce that earlier today we became the parents of beautiful twin babies, born Monday, August 4, 2008.

Riley Thomas was born at 6:12pm, weighed in at 5 lbs 5 oz and was 19″ long. He is named for Candy’s paternal grandmother, Pauline Riley Howell, and Sean’s dad.

Veronica Josephine was born at 6:13pm, weighed in at 5 lbs 10 oz and was 19.5″ long. She is named for Sean’s maternal grandmother, Helen Veronica Brennan Kobel, and Candy’s maternal great-grandmother, Josephine Miller Weaver.

Meeting Mommy and Daddy

For those of you just joining us, let’s rewind a moment…

We have been waiting for almost two years for a child. On July 8th, we received a call from our agency to ask if we would like to be considered for twins. Having received similar calls several times before, only to have our hearts broken, we tried not to get too excited. Somehow though, this time it seemed different. Twins? We had considered the possibility but never in our wildest dreams could have imagined it would happen! We did share that we were under consideration with our family and some very close friends, figuring the more prayers the better. We had been told that the birth parents would be reviewing potential adoptive families at the beginning of the following week, so when we hadn’t heard anything by that Wednesday, we began to think that we had once again been passed over. I got a text message from my sister that night asking if we had heard anything, so I sent an email to our case worker to see if there had been any news.

The next morning, July 17th, Candy was set to fly to Atlanta to visit her family. Shortly before we were going to be leaving for the airport, we got a message from Delta that her flight had been canceled, and that they were rebooking her on a flight at 7:45 that night. In the back of my mind, I wondered if there were a reason that flight was canceled. We got an email reply from our case worker that morning that her attempts to meet with the birth family earlier in the week had been postponed until that day. Around 5:45pm we left for Dulles. As we pulled up in front of the departures area for Delta, Candy began to get out of the car, when her phone rang. It was our case worker telling us that we had been picked!

The next few minutes were a blur. Candy decided to go ahead with her trip since it might be the last time for a while she’d have the freedom to go. I went home and started calling family. As we shared our news with an ever-growing circle of family and friends, the amount of support and love we received was overwhelming. We had so many people praying for us, we just knew it was all meant to be.

The two weeks since Candy got back from Georgia have been very busy indeed! We had been more or less prepared for one baby, but now we needed two of everything! Finally we learned that the babies were scheduled to arrive on August 4th. That has to have been the longest day of our lives. We were expecting to hear from our case worker when the babies were born, so when we hadn’t heard anything all day, we feared the worst. We finally got the call on Tuesday morning that the babies had been born, and were healthy. Later we learned their stats and that we would be meeting them on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning we packed up our cars and headed out.  We were about 15 minutes from home when we got the call that there had been another change in plans.  The babies wouldn’t be discharged as planned, and we would have to wait another day to see them.  We were rapidly running out of things to do around the house to keep ourselves busy, having already burned through most of what was on the Tivo waiting around on Monday and Tuesday.

This morning we met our case worker at the agency office and filled out all the paperwork.  We haven’t signed our names so much since we refinanced the house!  After that we got checked into the hotel (we have to stay in Maryland until Annapolis gives us permission to cross state lines and take them home to Virginia, probably about 2 weeks) and headed over to the hospital.  When we arrived we were met by one of our case workers and taken to the birth mother’s room to meet her for just a moment.  How do you thank someone for making all of your dreams come true?  Twice?  After that, we headed to the nursery, where we met Riley and Veronica for the first time.

If we had never believed in love at first sight before, we sure do now.  We spent about two hours with them at the hospital, getting all the discharge instructions and everything, before heading out.  I shot a picture message to the family while driving back, and when we got back to the hotel, Candy called her Mom. 

It’s now about 8:30pm.  We’ve been with them for just about 6.5 hours.  We’ve done a couple of feedings, a couple of changings, and for the moment they are both (more or less) asleep in the pack and play.  What an adventure has begun!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 and is filed under Photos, Adoption, Family, RILEY, VERONICA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.