Jami and the Day We Brought Eddie Home

Five years ago today (it was actually Friday the 13th) we brought Eddie home. We got him on the 9th, went through the Embassy on the 11th, but the 13th was the day our plane touched down on US soil and we went through customs - that was the moment I let myself believe it. In Guatemala, everything had gone pretty peachy, legal-stuff-wise. The husband and I had managed to catch some sort of bug (probably on the plane) that caused us each to spend 1 day in the hotel bathroom horking for all we were worth, and gave me a chance to practice my superior Spanish. "Gatorade" in Spanish is "GATORADE" with frantic gesturing at the bottles. Since I knew that "verde" means green and "limon" means lemon guess which flavors we got? I am certain the guy knew that the lemon was actually lemon lime (and to this day, I don't know what the green flavor was) but he was not about to argue the point with the increasingly verde gringo with a fistful of quetzels. I love Gatorade when I'm sick and I'll post on that tomorrow. Anyway, we got embassy approval, we had passports and visas stamped and approved. We had more paper than Dunder Mifflin, and I still worried that something would suddenly derail this journey of more than 2 years. So, when the nice man in the Customs uniform handed us back our papers and waved us through, a million emotions just flooded over me, mostly relief and pure joy. I burst into tears, right there in the concourse, but since we'd been on what they used to call "the baby flight" there were plenty of other sobbing mommies so I didn't stand out too much. Eddie was in the Snugli (my pre-mei tai days) and I just held onto him and sort of blindly followed The Husband who had the wits enough to be trying to find our connecting flight. The rest of that night is a blur of flight delays and phone calls, finding gates and luggage and seats, but I will never forget that moment when I let myself finally believe, when Eddie really and truly was forever ours.