When my 9-month-old daughter, Emma Caroline, looks up at me with those big, blue eyes and those incredibly long baby lashes, I wonder what she is thinking.

Does she know how much I love her?

Does she sense how long her mommy and daddy waited for her — this little, wiggly, giggly miracle?

Part of me likes to think she does.

Part of me likes to believe somewhere in that growing mind of hers she realizes how special she is to us.

The road my wife, Dahn, and I took to parenthood was fraught with potholes, unthinkable despair and a whole lot of tears.

When we were married, we had our guests make predictions of when we would become parents.

The guesses varied from as few as nine months to as many as five years.

No one had 12 years.

That's how long it took.

For the first few years of married life, we decided to just enjoy the two of us (well, six of us if you count a dog, two cats and a cockatiel).

When we finally decided to try to conceive, we ran into fertility troubles. A year turned into two. Two turned into seven.

We tried almost everything, including artificial insemination.

One try. Two tries. A half-dozen.

Didn't work.

Then, finally, a miracle.

My wife burst into our bedroom — I was still sleeping after a night of working on the sports desk at the Eagle — with a positive pregnancy test gripped tightly in her hand and tears streaming from her eyes.

“We're pregnant!” she bellowed.

My heart sang.

Then, it was shredded into a thousand pieces a few weeks later.

The baby had stopped developing at 5½ weeks. The pregnancy was no longer viable.

We were crushed.

It appeared our dream was over.

After the shock wore off, we tried to conceive again, unsuccessfully. Then we finally made the decision to adopt.

A year turned into two. Two into three.

We were about to give up again.

A call Oct. 1 of last year changed all of that.

“Good news,” the woman at our agency said, “think pink. Bad news, you have two weeks to get everything ready.”

On Oct. 15, Emma Caroline came into our lives — a perfect little bundle. The first time I held her I thought I'd crush her and break her into a million pieces.

But I didn't. She's a tough cookie, that one.

The first time I had to leave her, I cried. Bawled, really, all the way to my football game at Slippery Rock.

It's still difficult sometimes to leave her, reaching out for me.

Every night when I put her down to sleep, I sing to her and tell her how precious she is to her mommy and me. I tell her how lucky I am to have her and how incredibly brave and strong her biological mother was to know she could not care for her the way we could and give her up, blessing us with a child after waiting so long.

On this Father's Day, I will tell her all that again. It's going to be a special day for me.

One, honestly, I thought I would never enjoy in quite this way.

Thank you, Emma Caroline, for making me a father.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.