After 6 Months & 1 day of waiting

Last week was an easy work week for me and a tough one for Jose. My students were taking finals, so I was leaving school before four (which is heavenly). Jose, on the other hand, was working crazy hours trying to prepare for this big case. So, when I left school last Thursday, I called him to check-in. He asked if I could bring him some Starbucks and then we could hang out for a few minutes before his 4:30 appointment. As I drove downtown, I thought, “what if he has our referral.” (This is what I thought each time my classroom phone rang or Jose called in the middle of the day, so it really wasn’t any sort of intuition.)

I grabbed some Starbucks for us in his building and headed up to his office. When I sat down across from him, he told me he had to make a quick call. He put on the speaker and dialed the number. After a few rings, the voicemail of N., our adoption caseworker, started playing. My heart began to pound and he said, “we got the call.” I replied, “no we didn’t.” And he had to assure me several times that yes indeed we were about to get our referral. We had to leave a message and wait for N. to call us back.

Finally his office phone rang and it was the call. N. told us she had a referral and was sending it to Jose’s e-mail. We opened up the first attachment and there was Baby Barto staring at us with these huge, intense eyes. We went over multiple documents and looked at more photos.

After we finished the call, we looked at his pictures some more and tried to process all that had just happened. There was now a little boy in Ethiopia waiting for us.