Chapter 7 - Nine Months
Nothing about it got easy after that.
The legal process ran nine months. Nine of them. Home studies. Background checks. Fingerprints. Interviews in our living room. Court dates that got moved twice. A temporary foster arrangement while our application sat in a stack.
We weren't handed this baby just because Grace had said Daniel's name in a hospital room. And honestly — that was right. Grace could say who she trusted. She couldn't rewrite the law from a delivery bed.
The biological father signed away his rights formally. Caseworkers hunted for relatives. They turned up one distant cousin in another state, who said no over the phone in under a minute. At one point a caseworker told us, carefully, that another family could still be chosen instead of us.
That gutted me more than I expected. I drove home and sat on the garage floor next to the box of baby things we'd never gotten around to donating, and I cried until our four-year-old wandered out to ask if I was okay.
We didn't tell the boys everything right away. We said there was a baby who might need a family, and we were trying to help.
Our oldest asked if she was going to stay for good. "We don't know yet."
Our seven-year-old asked if she'd eventually be allowed in his room. "Eventually." He thought about it, then cried when we said yes.
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Our four-year-old asked if babies eat chicken nuggets. He's a simpler operation.
Eventually we became her foster placement. Months after that, the adoption went through. She came home for good in April.
