Welcome Jackson Daniel - long time coming!!!
I have not made any posts to this site for a little while due to a recent addition to our family unit. My wife and I just adopted our first child and little Jackson Daniel made his first appearence with our family on “gotchya day” on April 2nd, 2008. 
We have been in line for a Chinese adoption for over 3 years now and have all but given up hope on that one. We were caught right in the middle of many different factors coming together at once to cause this to slow down considerably, but that is an entirely different post. So, my wife and I decided to adopt locally while waiting for the Chinese government to get their collective heads out of their asses and let more of their lost girls get adopted.
So, we went through the full gamet of process to adopt locally - background, financials, fingerprints, home-study, classes, etc. There is a ton of stuff you have to do, but since we were ready for China, we pretty much had it all done and ready for the local one. We got in line at the end of December and got our call on March 29, 2008 - the day he was borne.
What is significant about this is that we were not expecting it. It was not like we had a mother that picked us or we knew the delivery date or anything. Nope, there was a baby and it was presented to us. Talk about stress. Even more intriguing was the fact that the baby did not meet our criteria for race. We are both white and this new baby was a mix Hispanic/African-American.
The wildcard, though, was that the baby was PERFECTLY healthy. The new baby boy was 6 pounds, 10 ounces and was in perfect health - no drugs, alcohol or smoking. This was indeed rare. Babies are rare enough - but a completely healthy one as well. We jumped at it and it has been GREAT!!!
Jackson is starting to smile and things are going wonderful. We are not getting enough sleep, of course, and the wife and I are “negotiating” over shifts. Awwwww, the fun has begun, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world!!!!
As a financial analyst, though, the best analogy I have heard for this came from my current boss, Rex. He said the first 6 months, it is all negative cash flow. Then the investment really starts producing for you when they start to smile and interact with you. Then you know where your time and money went…incredible…