This Gray Station Reporter Has a New Baby, But Not Much Time Off to Enjoy Her New Arrival
Just like that, WKYT (Lexington) Investigative Reporter Miranda Combs is a new mom after she and her husband adopted a baby girl.
Little Etta Jo was born Oct. 4 in Elizabethtown, KY and Combs posted to social media, “I’ve been keeping a secret! A month ago we took this perfect baby home. We are forever in awe of her birth mother’s courage to trust our love. It is truly the honor of our lives to welcome Etta Jo to the family.”
“I don’t know if it’s being 40 now ... but something came over us,” Combs said. “A lot of the stories that I focus on have been (about) the foster care system, adoption.”
The couple had been warned not to grow frustrated with the process of adopting; getting a placement could take a year to 18 months.
Instead, Combs said, they got a call on Oct. 6, just 18 days after their paperwork was completed, telling them a baby was waiting for them at a hospital in Hardin County.
A young woman who had just given birth two days earlier had sifted through a stack of profiles of prospective adoptive parents and chosen Combs and her husband for her newborn.
Could they be at the hospital in three hours to get her?
“We got in the car with just a car seat,” Combs said. “It was crazy.”
Combs said that as she was thinking about adoption, she expected to have months to accumulate vacation time so that she’d be able to stay home with a baby for a while.
But since things unfolded so speedily, she had just a week and a half of vacation time available, Combs said. She took two weeks off and then went back to work.
“It was still one of the hardest things to have to leave a two-week-old,” she said.
I’m guessing that WKYT owner Gray does not adoption leave like a lot of other companies which kind of sucks.
If I was working at WKYT, I would have donated my accrued vacation time to Combs to buy her a bit more time with her new baby.
Congrats to Miranda and her husband.