Bringing Gideon Home

Gideon was born in Las Vegas, Nevada and since we live in Texas, that makes things a little more complicated. We got custody of him on Tuesday November 15th (which was World Adoption Day, so cool!) and the next day, ICPC was submitted. ICPC stands for the Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children and is paperwork submitted from the adopting state to the home state. It can take 7-10 business days and with Thanksgiving being the next week, we were praying we could be home before Thanksgiving! We stayed with my girlfriend Katie in Las Vegas (more on that later, the biggest blessing!) and Jon flew home on Sunday November 20th to get the kids back home and settled from Mimi and Papa's. Only one parent has to stay through ICPC and I figured that if I had to be in Vegas for Thanksgiving, at least Jon would be home with Ford and Lucy. Tuesday November 22nd I woke up from a long night alone with G and we were having a lazy morning on the couch... okay all of our mornings/days in Vegas were lazy on the couch. My phone rang and my heart leapt when I saw our social services workers name pop up and she told me I could go home!! Because it was a holiday week, I had booked a flight just in case on Tuesday and Wednesday nights but they didn't leave until 9pm PST, 11pm CST. I quickly hopped online and found a flight leaving Vegas in 3 hours!! I quickly changed my flight (thank you Southwest), threw everything into my suitcase and got on the road. I managed to fill up the rental car, return the rental car at the offsite location, take the shuttle, check in, go through security, and get lunch with an hour to spare. Phew. I can't tell you how many random people helped me and commented on how cute G was. Flying with a 2 week old was surprisingly never on my bucket list! We made a quick touch down in Phoenix but didn't get off of the plane and arrived in Austin at 7pm. Gideon did SO great! He ate, slept, and cuddled. Jon came up to meet me right outside security and we rode the escalator together to see my entire family waiting for us with signs and balloons. I instantly started bawling and ran down to see my babies! I will let the pictures do the talking, there is also a video!