Speed Bumps are better than Road Blocks

After the smoothness and ease of everything leading up to Essie's birth and homecoming, we figured we would be in for a doozie the second time around! Um...we were right!

People often come to us for adoption advice/support and we send them here to read about our journey. This post is for anyone who read about the first experience and thought "boy, that seems easy!" Essie's was on the extreme easy side of things. Ruby is pretty close to the opposite extreme. The reality is that anything can happen in an adoption. Most families have a middle of the road experience, with a couple of speed bumps.

Of course, people, personalities and situation details add another dynamic to every story. To protect and respect the privacy of Miss M, I'm going to leave that out of our story.

Here are some of the bumps we've dealt with over the last 3 days....

Ruby was born in an emergency room of a hospital with no Maternity and was transported after birth to the hospital we are in currently. Hospitals are in different counties. Not normally a problem, but....since the first hospital has no maternity, they were unprepared to issue a birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, a child doesn't legally exist....as of this typing, we still have no birth certificate. What does this mean? We can't add her to insurance (because she doesn't "legally" exist right now). Also, our agency can't prepare the proper paperwork for Miss M (birthmom) to sign. Until those papers are signed, she isn't legally ours...

Adoptive situations always involve social workers. In the case of a newborn, you deal with workers both from the agency and the hospital. In Ohio, a Birthparent cannot sign paperwork to surrender rights until at least 72 hours after the birth or being informed of rights by the agency, whichever comes last. Being in a small hospital, and coming off a holiday weekend, there was no social worker on duty as everything occurred Saturday (and they don't have an on-call policy). Babies are normally kept at least 48 hours to be sure all is good. So, no social worker over the weekend isn't a problem since she wasn't 48 hours until Monday. Except that Miss M was released on Sunday. With no social worker, no one knew there were papers she had to sign that would allow someone other than her to leave the hospital with the baby. Hence the reason I'm still here....

In this case, the hospital social worker we are dealing with has limited experience. She is doing a fabulous job, but things are taking longer since she has to constantly refer to policies to make sure she's doing things properly. There is another social worker here with over 20 years experience in adoptive situations. However, because of a potential conflict of interest, she cannot be consulted.


So, yeah, speed bumps. Inconvenient. Frustrating. But, in the end, we still get to take home a baby!

Ruby

**Disclaimer** What I am posting now is not public knowledge yet. So, if we are facebook friends, please do not mention anything until I post in a couple of days. Thank you!

Our New Year started off with a bang. A big one! An unexpected one! About 6:30 last night, our social worker called. A baby girl had been born in the morning, an adoption plan was being made, and she's ours!!!! *Commence freaking out!!!!*

Things were thrown together very quickly, my parents were happy to take Essie for us, and we hit the road. As I type, we are sitting in a hospital room about an hour away from home, watching our new baby girl as she sleeps in her bed.

For personal reasons, Birthmom (Miss M) has decided to not have contact with the baby while in the hospital. So, until we arrived last night, the nurses had a ball loving on her! Not fans of calling her "baby girl", they decided to call her Ruby! :-) We have since given her a name, but I'm going to hold off on that until we can post pictures to go with it.

We are hopeful about being able to come home with Ruby tomorrow morning/early afternoon. However, the legal surrender won't happen until Tuesday evening.

That's all for now. I need a little nap! :-)