So, where was I, oh yeah, we were on our way to Billings. That is an eight hour driver from where we live. We stopped in Missoula to get a baby name book! We had a girl's name picked out, for some reason we were convinced we were going to have a girl, you know how that goes...So I started calling out names that I liked and Kent would say yay or nay and all the yeses were written on a list. We narrowed it down to a dozen or so that we were contemplating. We looked up the meanings of the names and thought about the meanings as related to Bible characters and what they stood for. We didn't make any decisions yet on what his name would be...
We got checked in at the hotel in Billings and decided to get a bite to eat at the Windmill Steak House. We took out the list of names and then as I recall we wrote our favorite names again. I honestly cannot remember if they matched right away or not, but we came to a consensus pretty quickly. Josiah, which means "fire of God" was what we settled on after we read the story of King Josiah and really like how he stood for God in the midst of idolatry. We picked Christian, which means as you would expect "follower of Christ". We wanted him to remember his roots where ever life took him in the future. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and as you might think, we didn't get much sleep that night (at least I didn't).
I was a bundle of nerves in the morning. We were supposed to meet at 3:00 p.m, but the social worker had not confirmed anything since we had left home. I kept asking my husband to call and find out what was going on, I knew I couldn't do it. I was near tears practically all day! I couldn't believe that they would make us wait until 3:00 p.m.! How could they do that? Anyway, we made the best of it and had breakfast, went shopping a bit and had a salad for lunch. We were called to meet at 2:00! I was absolutely beside myself, I could hardly keep it together! I was sweating and ready to burst into tears at any moment--
We headed to the office in Billings. We went in the door and were greeted by Lorraine, one of the social workers. We were brought into a small living room type place and waited for what seemed to me like a hundred years. We could hear them showing our little boy off out in the hall and I could hardly contain myself to sit still and wait until they came in. Finally, they brought in this little 6 pound, 12 ounce boy wearing a baseball one piece outfit and put him in my arms. It was love at first sight, there is just not other way of describing it! The tears came instantly, I couldn't believe my eyes, I couldn't believe it was really happening! He was beautiful! He had reddish blonde hair. We fed him and held him and sat in amazement of this precious gift of life that was being entrusted to us...and then we had some paperwork to sign and finish up. Once we talked with the cradle care foster Mom who was also named Kim (she had adopted two children and they were with her and were now 7 and 9 or so years old) and found out what kind of formula he was on and all the details of caring for him, we walked out the door. Talk about a weird feeling! Can we really take him home with us, we thought...and to top it all off we weren't even sure how to get him in the car seat-- we thought for sure they were going to take him back from us thinking we were unfit parents, but instead they just chuckled and smiled knowingly...
Once we were on the road, I was in back with him and we were just trying to get as far as we could to get as close to home as we could. Our first stop was at Arby's to use the bathroom and change him. Again, I thought for sure someone was going to ask us whose baby that was and call the police or something, it was such as strange feeling...No one stopped us except to say, "He looks just like you"! We would smile to ourselves just as proud as we could be that our son, Josiah Christian was really gifted to us by God and now we too had entered into the world of parenthood where we too had the awesome responsibility to raise him up to fear and love God above all else...
