Meeting Kallen
At this point in time, we hadn’t yet told the girls about Kallen. We wanted more information and we wanted to confirm some things with the agency and our lawyers before we got their hopes up, so Kevin and I were the only ones that knew about him for close to 24 hours. On the morning of October 14th, we had a call with our attorney. Later that day we called Bethany and officially accepted the match, and future placement, which was planned for the following day.
Meanwhile, it was a school day for the girls. Our schools were still phasing into in-person school so Karsten was physically in school that day but Kate was at home doing e-learning. Kevin and I took her out to lunch (Chilis, which had recently opened in our town) and while we were sitting there, we told her the good news! She is very perceptive so she had heard some of our conversations and had a pretty good idea of what was going on but her eyes and face lit up when we confirmed what she suspected! She was SO excited.
We still hadn’t told Karsten.
That night, we had a lot to do to get ready for little man! The room that was to become the nursery had been converted to my office back in March, when we got sent home to work due to COVID. We quickly unloaded a makeshift desk, 3 monitors, a docking station, my laptop, chair and allll the office stuff and put that back in our formal living room. Then the crib got pulled down from the attic. Kate and Karsten got all into helping. They dusted off the crib and wiped everything down. They helped vacuum the room.
Kate of course knew WHY we were doing this, but Karsten did not. All she knew was that we were in the process of adopting and that she had been praying for a baby boy since January. We asked Karsten why she thought that we were doing all of this stuff and she immediately said “Well duh. We’ve been praying for a baby brother so we have to get a room ready for him for when we get him!” We let Kate be the one to tell her and she said, “Well, Karsten, what if Mommy and Daddy go get him tomorrow?” She was floored!
Pretty soon, the room was all ready for Kallen! (Or, at least as ready as you can get a room in just a couple of hours!)
As Kevin and I were getting the girls ready for bed and turning off the lights, we looked in and saw that they had left little gifts for their new baby brother. Karsten left a card in the crib, and each of the girls left their special stuffed animals as a welcome home gift. Kate left her tiger (Tigey) and Karsten left her bunny (Bunny).
Karsten also left a post it right above his crib. She said she didn’t want him to forget that she loves him! Of course I had to get a picture of the baby sister, who was about to become the BIG sister.
The next morning, Kevin and I had to leave super early, so my mother-in-law came over to get the girls ready and take them to school. Meanwhile Kevin and I were on our way to the hospital to meet our son!
But first, we had to go to the agency to sign a boatload of paperwork. As we were signing papers, I kept fielding emails from work to make sure that things there kept getting moved along for my deadline. Thankfully, I was already in pretty good shape so there wasn’t a ton to do, but I was still trying to keep things under the radar because it wasn’t yet a “done deal”. After the paperwork was signed, around 10am, we headed over to the hospital.
We went through the COVID protocols of checking in (getting our temperature checked, etc) and then headed up to the nursery. As soon as we got off the elevator, there was a nurse holding a sweet baby boy – and it was Kallen! They said he was so cuddly and everybody had been wanting to hold him.
They took us into his room so we could take off our masks to officially meet him. At 5 days old he weighed 5 lbs 7 oz. He was a tiny little thing! They had socks on his hands because he kept scratching his face!
I held him first, and then Kevin.
We changed his diaper, and his clothes, fed him a bottle and then waited on the doctor to make his rounds so we could take him home!
Did you spy the wash cloth on Kevin’s shoulder? I hadn’t located the burp cloths in our attic so we had to make do with what we had!
And then, finally, we were ready to get him in the car and get him home to meet his big sisters! They were SOOOO excited and I got text from both of their teachers letting me know that the girls had been sharing the news, and couldn’t wait for school to get out!
