Firefighter Mark Hadden, 47, will never forget the day that changed his family’s lives forever. That day, November 14, 2011, he helped get Gracie’s mother, his adopted daughter, into the back of an ambulance.
“It was a typical November day,” Hadden said. “We sat down to eat, there had been no incidents before. »
Suddenly, his team received an emergency call from a woman complaining of extremely painful abdominal pain. When Hadden and his team arrived on the scene, they discovered that the woman had in fact given birth.
They quickly transferred the woman to the ambulance and there they realized that they were no longer in time for the hospital. He remembers his colleague saying, “We’re going to have a little one here.”
Hadden goes on to recall, “We didn’t have time to prepare. Before we could do anything – we didn’t even cut her clothes – Gracie arrived. They gave it to me right away. Hadden jokingly said hello, Rebecca Grace Hadden.
When Hadden spoke to the woman, he learned that she was homeless and about to send her newborn baby up for adoption.
The firefighter himself and his wife have long wanted a third baby. They had two boys and dreamed of a girl.
Two days after Gracie was born, they took her home, and in March 2012, they finally won full custody of Gracie.
Gracie now lives with her two older brothers, who are Hadden’s biological sons; Parker, 14 and Will, 16. “The guys really like her and she likes them. She’s a wonderful little one,” Hadden said.
Interestingly, Hadden and his wife didn’t hide this story from Gracie. She knew she was adopted and that Hadden was the one who brought her into the world.
“She knows the whole story. I didn’t want it to be a huge surprise. It still breaks my heart when I remember one day I needed to explain to him in more detail…” Hadden said.
