This is the story of how working for a tax software company made me a mom.

I used to work for a tax software company. We created an on-line personal tax preparation software program that turned out to be quite successful. For those of you not familiar with the behind the scenes of a software development company, I’ll give you the brief description. Long hours (any where from 8 to 20 hour days, depending on the season). Junk food (take out, pizza, fast food. You name it, we ate it). Good pay (thank God for stock options). No life outside of work and the friends we had there. That pretty much sums up the life that I (and my husband) were living.

Because of the success of the program we created, we were approached by a “bigger” software company, offered lots of money, and eventually bought out and dismantled. While it was sad to see people lose their jobs, see all our hard work just shut down, it turned out to be a turning point in my life.

Thanks to the stock options, I was immediately able to pay off all the debt that my husband and I had accumulated. And it was substantial to say the least. (That’s a story for another post another day).

I also realized that working for a software company was not what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life. It was a great place to be for a season, but it wasn’t what I was passionate about.

One day my husband said to me “I think I hear my biological clock ticking.” I looked at him a bit puzzled and said “isn’t that supposed to be my line?” By this time we had been married almost 10 years and intentionally didn’t have children. But he reminded me of a program we had seen some years earlier about all the abandoned girls in China. He said “I think that’s something maybe we should consider now.”

Before you could say international adoption, we were contacting adoption agencies, figuring costs, looking at different countries, and were one step closer to changing our lives forever.

Well after much paperwork (you think buying a house is a lot of paperwork), several meetings with a social worker, trips to the INS, the jail to be fingerprinted (for the county, state and feds), biographies written and all documentation notarized by the local, state and Chinese governments, we were finally ready to wait. Yes I said wait. Once we had done all this work we had to wait. And wait. And wait some more. Referral times were running around 10 to 11 months. Longer than any pregnancy I had ever heard of.

And then the call came. Work ceased, and the wait for the FedEx guy started. Little did he know the package he was delivering would change not just one life, but three lives forever. After more paperwork, flying for 13+ hours (I called that my labor) one bad meal, one mystery meal, and an exhausting walk on the Great Wall of China we me the most beautiful, precious gift ever given to us and started a new chapter in our lives.

Fast forward 7 1/2 years – and here we are in 2008. Parents of an incredible 8 1/2 year old. Yes, that’s her in the picture above, a few years ago in Leavenworth, Washington. And I could go on, but I will save more of the story for another post.