An adoption story to share:

I had to share this. One of our neighbors recently adopted from St. E's. Their beautiful story is below:

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 9:44pm, after 11 hours of hard labor, a woman named Sarah gave birth to a 8lb 11 oz baby boy.

On Saturday, Sarah gave us our son who we named Nathaniel. Words cannot describe our appreciation for her selfless act of love. We will be eternally grateful.

We completed our adoption application in the spring of this year. In mid-September, we received a call from St. Elizabeth’s, our adoption agency, telling us that we had been chosen by a birth mother, Sarah. Sarah was seven months pregnant and her due date was November 15th. Needless to say, we were in shock. The next day, we met with St. Elizabeth’s and during our conversation we asked what it was about our adoption scrapbook that made Sarah choose us. Sarah’s adoption counselor said there were two things in our book that Sarah mentioned. First, she liked that we included a picture of Katie with Miss Peggy, her babysitter and wrote in our book that Miss Peggy would also be taking care of our next child. Second, she liked that we had named our dog after a character in Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged”, one of her favorite books. Finally, after nine years, my wife Stephanie is no longer giving me grief for naming our dog: Rearden.

When Stephanie was pregnant with our daughter, Katie, we had decided not to find out if the baby would be a boy or a girl. When it came to names, we both liked Katharine but we could not decide on a boy’s name. The day she was born we still didn’t have a boy name and I was convinced that had Katie been a boy, he would have been a boy named Kate.

Sarah, the birthmother, also didn’t know if she was carrying a boy or a girl. However, this time we had no problem deciding on a name. We chose Nathaniel for his first name because Nathaniel means “Gift from God”. His middle name, Taggart, is the last name of the heroine in “Atlas Shrugged”, the book that helped bring us together.