The phone rings around 3:00 in the afternoon. I am busy reviewing my lecture notes for my class that evening, so I reflexively silence the call – a bad habit of mine when it comes to phone numbers I don’t recognize. But as I watch the phone continue to buzz on the counter, something nudges me to answer this one. I pick up on what is probably the last ring before voicemail. 

“Katie,” I hear a voice nearly whimpering from the other end of the line. “They won’t let me keep her.” 

It’s Hannah*, the young woman I had met two months earlier through an organization that helps homeless and transient young adults in our city.

“Hannah? Are you ok? Where are you?” I prod for more information.

“The social worker’s office,” she says.

Hannah’s baby had been born four days prior, which I knew, because I had taken her to the hospital. For months, we had anticipated that keeping and raising a baby would be exceptionally challenging for Hannah for a multitude of reasons – reasons that belong to her story, not ours. But we never expected her to call us when those reasons all came forward. 

With a spinning head, and knowing I would not get much clear information from Hannah, I ask to talk to the social worker. I hear Hannah pass the phone over, and then a distant she wants to talk to you.

“Hi, Katie?” the woman asks. “Hannah’s told me about you. My name is Rachel, I’m with Child Protective Services.” 

Over the next few minutes, Rachel explains as much as she can about what has transpired since I left the hospital on Thursday afternoon. The bottom line: no suitable caregiver is available to care for the baby girl, whom Hannah had named Ava. 

Ava, what a gorgeous name, I think to myself. 

Ava needs a place to go right away, and Hannah wants us to take her. 

I pull the phone away from my ear and try to communicate to my husband – with the social worker waiting on the other end of the call – about what is happening. CPS won’t let her keep the baby… She’s asking us to take her… as soon as possible… now… I have no idea for how long… what do you think? Alex looks at me with big eyes, shocked and overwhelmed, but also filled with tenderness. He nods.

“We will take her,” I tell Rachel.

Seven minutes after the phone rang, with no foster license and very little information, we start making arrangements to bring a four-day-old baby girl home to our family that night. 

The CPS office handling Ava’s case is just over 90 miles from us. We make the plan to meet a different social worker halfway between our hometown and their office. 

“How about the McDonald’s parking lot right off I-90?” she suggests. Perhaps I should question handing a newborn off in a fast food parking lot right next to the freeway, but I don’t argue.

As we wait for a quick background check to go through, in a blur of feelings and trepidation, I call my friend, Kelly, and beg her to come with me to pick up the baby while Alex stays home with our other three children.

Of course I don’t need to beg. She says yes before I could nervously finish the question.

We get in the car a little after 7:30pm and make the fifty-minute drive to our meeting point. I tell her everything I knew about the situation, and she – a foster parent herself – gives me a blitz lesson in the state foster care system and everything she thinks we can expect in the coming days and weeks – home inspections, health and welfare checks, doctor appointments, court reviews. Then, as we approach the freeway exit, Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder and starts praying out loud, for everything.

I am told to look for a white SUV, and with little competition for space at 8:30pm on a Monday night, I spot it right away. Kelly and I both get out of the car at the same time the social worker does. The woman had just fed Ava a bottle in the backseat of her car, and steps out of the door with the tiniest little girl wearing a pink onesie in her arms. She hands her to me for a moment, and then a clipboard. 

You must be Katie/can I see your driver’s license/please sign these/Ava just spit up and I don’t have a change of clothes for her. 

The words seem to come out in one sentence. She is busy, in a hurry, business as usual in the life of a social worker. Without being asked, Kelly grabs Ava so I can sign all the paperwork, and immediately brings her over to our car to get warm and safely snuggled back in her carseat. Everything Ava owns, from the crocheted blanket to the skin at the top of her little bald head, is thick with the smell of cigarette smoke.

She sleeps the whole ride home.

By the time I pull into our driveway around 10:00pm, Alex and my oldest daughter, Harper have the whole house clean. My friend, Annie, had dropped off newborn baby girl clothes. Kelly had grabbed formula, bottles, and a pack of diapers. Everything else can wait until the morning. 

And Ava sleeps more – peacefully unaware of the chaos of parental visits and court dates and home inspections swirling around the first days of her life story. I look down at the cadence of her chest moving up and down through the heaviness of newborn sleep more times than I can count. Her breath reminds me to take a deep one, too. 

She is so beautiful. 

And to think I almost didn’t answer the phone. 

//

Our McDonald’s baby turns four years old today. 

Four years old. I can hardly believe it. We are entering a season of her life when we will talk to her about adoption, about her biological mom and dad, about surprises and blessings and divine interruptions to our plans. There is so much I want to tell her, and there’s a lot I don’t. Kids don’t enter foster care because of beautiful beginnings; they enter because of broken ones.

But like most things, I trust the Lord that we will sort that all out with his help over time. 

Today though, we will mostly talk about miracles, over McDonald’s french fries.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.