Post referral craziness (part 1)

First, I can't resist having Maisie's picture at the top of my blog because she's so darn cute!! So she may be toping my posts for a while, at least until I get a picture of her onto the sidebar.

OK referral day was long. Daphne wanted to come over at 7am or some other freakishly early hour, but I had things to do in the morning and knew that I'd be finished before 11 am, which would be the earliest the Atlanta CCAI office would start their calls. So Daphne arrived just before 11 am and was absolutely freaking out with excitement. She paced the hall, clicked her pen, complained about how long it was taking, was on the verge of an anxiety attack, thought she was going to be sick, not a calm bone in her body.

I was excited that our day was finally here but I was still relatively calm. I was sitting at the computer answering emails and responding to comments as well as stalking the sites of other bloggers expecting their calls and waiting for them to post their pictures. So, Julie, Jodie, Jodi, Andrea, Caroline, Dawn, Gwyn, Karyn, Lindsey, Mary, Melissa and Wendy if you go back and see thousands of hits on your site from Atlanta, it was me!! Congrats to all of you, your babies are fabulous and I know just like Eammon and I, you're so in love, floating on air and can't wait to travel.

I love how so many people supported us, shared with us and we're caught up in the excitement of our day. I can't even express how special that was to us, thank you so much to everyone who followed along and especially to those who left comments or sent emails. I've responded to all the emails and I'm still working on responding to all the comments where there's a link back to an email address. So many of the comments don't link back to email addresses so to those people, please accept my thanks here. Focusing on all the emails and comments made me laugh and it really helped the time pass.

About 1:15 I found out that Atlanta wasn't going to be making our calls because the conference call from Denver was late in the morning and the Atlanta office already had people arriving for a farewell party for one of the gals who was leaving and Friday was her final day. Since the office is the size of maybe three cubicles, there was no privacy so our referral calls got bumped back to Denver so they could make the calls. We must have been put at the bottom of the pile as the Atlanta people were the last to get their calls. Well no complaining because we have Maisie!!

Daphne was great once the call came in. I had the call on speaker so that she could hear all the info and write it all down just in case my hands were too shaky to write. I remained pretty calm and was able to talk and write and Daphne made sure that I asked all the questions on my list and then she sat quietly as I stared at Maisie's picture and got teary eyed. I had told her ahead of time that Eammon had to see the picture before I was going to let her see it, so even though I know she was jumping out of her skin to see the computer screen, she remained calm.

I called Eammon only to get his voice mail so I sent him a page and he left a meeting he was chairing to call. I told him all the info and sent him an email with the picture. Before he received the picture, he said he'd call back. I thought he was just going somewhere private to look at the email but he looked at it and then had to go back into the meeting to finish it off. After about 15 minutes I paged him again since I didn't know if the email had gone through and if he was happy. About 5 minutes later he called back, he had just briefly looked at the picture before heading back into the meeting and only now could call back. Well, once I got off the phone with Eammon and I told Daphne she could see the picture, you never saw a girl move so fast.

While I was waiting for Eammon to call back and while I was settling down I filled the details into the announcement email and wrote up the post and upload the picture to our blog. After Eammon saw the picture and we chatted a bit I called my parents before hitting the send button on the email and post. I only got their machine... Geez where was everyone??

Once the email was sent and the post posted, I started calling the ladies who lunch. I didn't get to talk to anyone for too long though as the call waiting started clicking in almost immediately.
Eammon arrived home soon after I posted and emailed everyone and we spent a bit of time ooohhhhhing and ahhhhhhing over Maisie's picture.
Here we are, the proud new parents!

Daphne headed home and Eammon and I spent some time going over all the info I had been given during the phone call and we each cried a little as we studied Maisie's sweet face. We then headed out for a quick celebratory dinner before coming home to many more emails and phone messages. I started returning phone calls, starting on the east coast, working my way west finally getting off the phone and into bed around 3am.

I now have to run out so I'll write part two of this post tomorrow.