Our Vacation to Montreal - Recap

Part of what's really making us smile is that the train station is a block from our respective places of work.

This was us on the start of our trip to Montreal on October 6, 2013.  We haven't even left Moncton when I took this picture.  Look at us.  So young.  So naive about what life in the big city will be like.  So full of excitement about eating a meal on the train.  

This was what our first night looked like in Montreal:

Did you know you can buy wine at the grocery stores in Quebec?!  That wine may look fancy, but it came from a juice box.  I, of course, am having a Coke (chilled, no ice).

Boom, we are wild and crazy.  For those of you who might be counting, that is the same glass of wine.  It's my second Coke though.  Shortly after this picture was taken, we opened up a bag of Doritos.

If you could pan down, you'd see a woman in her housecoat and a shower cap standing on a plastic chair on her balcony, cleaning her windows.  It was less exciting than I'm making it out to be.

This was the picture I took about an hour before I wrote my last post.  I was going to upload it when I started my second post of our trip, which was tentatively titled "Montreal - Day Two".  I am not always an imaginative man.

About thirty minutes after I hit submit on my previous post, we got a phone call that has changed our lives.

My Lovely Wife and I have been on the adoption waiting list for a while - years in fact.  We have waited for that call for so long... it's really hard to describe what it's like when it finally happens.  Relief, excitement, joy, panic.  I imagine everything that everyone who has ever had a child feels when they hold their baby for the first time, only without the months of prior knowledge to get ready for that moment.

At 9:35 AM, we got the call from our social worker that we had been chosen by the birth parents to adopt their beautiful baby girl.  That call lasted 4 minutes and 3 seconds.  It was followed by about twenty minutes of just full out crying and cheering (cheerying?).  I had enough presence of mind to take the following picture:

You can barely see my other arm holding the camera.

Because we had taken the train to Montreal, and thanks to the budget cuts from VIA, the next train home wasn't until the next day.  We were not going to wait that long.  So we bought tickets on the first available flight back to Moncton, which didn't leave for another 6 hours.  We spent the intervening time calling family and friends.  If you didn't hear the news from us directly, don't take it personally - we had 2 years to put together a phone tree for just this situation and we didn't get to it.  Then, when we couldn't stand to stay in the hotel room any longer for fear that we might burst, we went for a walk.

When we finished walking and buying the few souvenirs that we would end up purchasing at the paper store, we high tailed it for the airport.

Ironically, since we were now leaving Montreal, the weather improved dramatically.

Nothing against the airport in Montreal, but there was nothing there that was as exciting as the news that we kept repeating to each other. This was the view from our gate as we waited for our flight.  We talked to a couple of nice ladies who were both returning from Alberta, but I don't really remember anything about either of them.  Come to think of it, one of them might have been a guy.  No, wait, they were both women.  I'm 50% sure.  They were both nice though.  If I could pan the camera to the left, you'd see them both.  But I can't, so you won't.

I don't have any pictures of Wednesday, because that was full of running around trying to find things for an infant.  Things like a car seat/stroller combo unit.  Who would have thought that there'd be so many options?  Who would have known that every option that we wanted was out of stock, not available, or discontinued due to safety issues?  We did get one, and we're happy with it, and I'm only a little disappointed that it didn't come with an MP3 player, shock absorbers or satellite radio.

But then the most important part of all was actually meeting our baby girl.  It's a picture that has made it's way around Facebook, so you may have seen it already, but I like it enough that I'm using it again.

She's pretty incredible.

I managed to get almost all of this written while she was down for a nap.  Right up to this last picture.  But now I have to go entertain a no-year-old with funny faces and weird noises.  I'll also be making funny faces and weird noises.  (See what I did there?)