Last year at DevLink, I can clearly recall sitting in a session about Durandal and John Papa’s Hot Towel VS template. My friend Michael Johnson was speaking. I was sitting two or three rows from the back because the room had filled up pretty quickly.

We were about halfway into his presentation when I received the following text from my wife:

As you can see in the text, I was shocked to say the least. We had taken our initial adoption class about three years earlier, but we hadn’t made any progress during that time. In fact, we ended up having our firstborn daughter during our waiting period for adoption.

It didn’t make it any easier that I was in Chattanooga while my wife was still home beginning to make plans to bring home a new little girl. We ended up taking the weekend following DevLink as a pre-adoption vacation with friends in Chattanooga because we knew our lives were about to change quite a bit.

The Tuesday following the infamous text message, we were at the hospital meeting Nora. My mom had driven over to help us with the transition and to watch our oldest daughter. Because of complications, though, we weren’t able to bring her home that day. Needless to say, that was pretty devastating. We had already built up a lot of expectations after having spent the entire day getting to hold her and take care of her. There aren’t many things more difficult than leaving the hospital NICU with an empty car-seat - it gave us just a glimpse of what it might be like for many families who never get to bring their babies home.

Fortunately, though, we did get to bring her home on Thursday. All things considered, things were pretty easy at first. Given that Nora had spent the first three months of her life in the hospital, she was on a routine. The NICU nurses had her on a set schedule and they had trained her on how to get to sleep. At night, we could swaddle her, give her a paci, and walk away - done. To this day, it is still harder to get Daila to sleep than her and she’s almost three years old!

We’ve now spent the last 6 (almost 7) months getting to know this little girl. She’s traveled with us to Maine, Florida and Texas. We’ve changed even more diapers (my oldest one is still working on potty training) than before. She’s even starting to crawl now! Through all of this, she’s quickly become part of our family.

Less than a month ago, we were able to finalize on our adoption! Now, Nora is officially a “Mohundro” (or “My-hundro” as Daila likes to say)!