If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is priceless.
Lacy and Banks Farris created it after they adopted a baby through an online match.
Following years of infertility, miscarriage and a failed placement, they wanted to celebrate their open adoption news in a special way.
So with Lacy holding their newborn and Banks armed with a camera, they filmed the heartbreaking moment when they made a surprise visit to their family and friends to introduce their little girl for the first time.
“Our entire family was overjoyed for us!” Lacey says. “Both sides had been praying for so long for us, they had no idea!”
Banks’ 78-year-old grandmother was so shocked she had to sit down.
“Oh my word, I’m going to pass out!” she exclaims in the video.
Lacey got the idea for the movie after watching all of her friends get pregnant.
“I was so envious,” she says. “I just wanted to be a mother. It’s hard seeing everyone you know posting pregnancy pictures and being happy.”
The California couple had tried to get pregnant for more than a year before Lacey learned she was going to have a girl. But the baby died at birth.
They turned to open adoption, and to finding an adoption match through the Web, after going through two rounds of intrauterine insemination.
But their first match didn’t go as they had hoped: the placement fell through after the expectant parents chose to parent.
“I was hurt, but now I understand the mother made the right decision,” says Lacey. “The questions that came in from my family were hard though. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”
But they didn’t give up. Eventually another adoption match, which they found online, came their way. This time, they kept the placement under wraps until the birthparents’ revocation period had expired.
After they officially became parents, they decided to go on an unexpected road trip with their newborn to Tennessee, Alabama and Arizona to visit family members and friends.
“We couldn’t wait for everyone to meet her!” says Lacey, who describes her new daughter as “absolutely amazing and so, so beautiful. She’s perfect.”
Read the full story about Lacey and Banks open adoption news.
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