We had a BABY!

And whew, did that 9 months go FAST! Really, though, my world is happier than ever! I'm exhausted and exhilirated and going to bed. Here's a cut and paste of the e-mail we sent to family and friends tonight. YEAH! I'm a MOM again!!!!

We are SO excited to share our news with everyone! We have a new baby and BOY did he come fast!

Last week, we felt that it was time for us to work on finding a new baby through adoption. We started getting paperwork in order to turn into LDS Family services. There was an agency in Utah that we had heard so many wonderful things about that we also decided to look into. We made a phone call to the agency on Friday morning and left a message telling them we were interested in learning more about their agency. Saturday we worked on "Dear Birthparent" letters to turn into LDS Family Services to update our profile there. Also, Saturday, the Utah agency called back to let us know they'd gotten our message and they'd call us back with more information after the long weekend.

Sunday morning at 6:30 am we got a phone call from the agency in Utah. They said they had some "questions". Hmmm...They wanted to know how far we were with our home study and if we cared about the gender or race of the baby. After I answered the questions, the worker told us that they had a baby born at 4:00 am that day (Sunday, the 19th) and needed a family pronto - were we interested? Could we come to Utah right away to get the baby? I ran to wake Nathan up and make sure it was all ok with him - just the night before we were talking about the adoption process, and that we were expecting to wait up to 6 months or more. We thought and talked about it and everything felt SO right. We spent Sunday getting packed and getting papers in order.

We flew to Utah (very, very) early this morning. We went straight to the hospital where we met our new little baby boy! Joshua Lucas was 8 lbs, 11 oz and 21" long. He is perfect and perfectly adorable. The **best** news of all is that Josh's birth mom signed final papers this morning, and we signed papers this afternoon - meaning he's 100% ours. Utah has a "no changing your mind after the ink's dry" law...as long as our social worker in CA signs off on everything, we're totally in the clear!!! We'll come back to Utah in 6 months to go to court and finalize, but it's as good as done. We are so thrilled with knowing that we don't have to wait and worry for 30 minutes or 30 days that a mind might change. He's ours!!

Joshua did swallow some amniotic fluid when he was born, which is really normal. He was in an oxygen tent for a day, and will most likely be on IV antibiotics until the end of the week. We're hoping he'll be discharged from the hospital by Saturday at the latest. We should be back in CA by the following weekend; we'll have to wait in UT for paperwork to go through that will let us bring Josh from one state to the other.

We're so excited he's here and excited to have him in our family!

Julie, Nathan, Jacob and JOSHUA

Yes, I just realized the pictues I uploaded are the wrong ones and are all fuzzy. I'm TOO TIRED to fix it now. Now your eyes will be as blurry as mine and I'll fix it tomorrow. Maybe. Unless I'm cuddling with my new son.