Teri and Rich Guy talk at StoryCorps in St. George, about adopting their daughter, Tessa.
"We got married, and after we were together for a couple years it was like, 'OK. Gosh, wouldn't it be fun to share some of these experiences with a little one?'" Rich said. "But we had a problem actually, because Teri couldn't get pregnant. It wasn't just you, because I had a low sperm count. I think... what did the doctors tell you?"
Teri: I didn't ovulate. They put me on Clomid so I would get pregnant, and nothing worked.
Rich: Nope. We didn't give up. So at some point in time we decided, 'You know what, maybe we can adopt.' Because we really really wanted to have a child.
Teri: And we didn't care if it was biologically our child.
Rich: So we went through the adoption process. We were lucky.
Teri: I've actually got copies of that paperwork now, and it's really funny because I typed it all on a manual typewriter, so it's pretty primitive looking. It's got lots of misspelled words. Our income was like, $15,000 a year between both of us.
Rich: Which we thought we had money. We got a call one day, and come on down and check out this little baby.
So the Guys went to see the baby, who was born premature.
"And they said, 'so we're going to bring a baby into you, and we want you to take the baby's shoes off, her clothes, and everything and inspect her head to toe because if she looks like Uncle George and you don't like Uncle George, you need to give her back,'" Teri said.
But they had already fallen in love with their new baby girl, Tessa. The Guys couldn't take their daughter home, because she had to weigh 6 lbs., and at three months of age, she was 2 lbs. 14 oz.
Once Tessa had reached the correct weight, they got to take her home.
"We took her home. That was the day I actually quit smoking. I used to smoke at least a pack a day. If you've ever smoked cigarettes before, you know you quit at least a hundred times. But that day, I quit. There was no reason to smoke around her," Rich said.
"What I remember was that car seats were not mandatory at the time. So we wrapped her up and I held her in the car, and you drove really slowly all the way from San Bernadino to Apple Valley which was about a 45-minute drive."
Teri and Rich now have three children, one adopted, the other two, biological.