With shaky hands, Chris Martinez, a firefighter in Belen, New Mexico, dialed his wife’s phone number.
“The first thing he said was, ‘I’m crying right now,’” Janae Martinez, 39, tells TODAY.com.
Through tears, Chris, 44, explained to Janae that a newborn had been placed in the station’s Safe Haven Baby Box— a device that allows someone to safely and anonymously surrender a child, no questions asked.
He didn’t yet know it, but that baby would become his son Mikel.
Chris was one of the first to help Mikel, who was found on Feb. 6, wrapped in a towel with his umbilical cord still attached. There was no note. Just weeks earlier, Chris and Janae Martinez had received their certification to become foster parents.
“The timing was perfect,” Chris says. “It was meant to be.”
Mikel, who weighed 5 pounds, was blue from the cold, his body shivering.
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on him that I wanted to be his dad,” Chris says. “I was going to protect him.”
After 15 years of struggling with infertility, he and Janae were ready to become parents. Chris recalls the deep longing he felt whenever the other firefighters talked about their kids.
“We wanted it so badly,” Janae says.
Two days later after Mikel was found, the couple was approved by the state to visit the baby at UNM Health System, where he was being treated for pneumonia and hypothermia in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
“He was in rough shape,” Chris says.
Janae gets emotional as she speaks about holding her son for the first time.
“He was so fragile and I fell in love with him,” she says. “I gave him that first bottle and I just looked in his eyes and it was instant. I knew.”
Chris and Janae visited Mikel every day during his month-long stay in the hospital, cherishing every moment with him.
“That was hard because here we were getting attached and we didn’t even know if we were going to be his foster parents,” Janae says.
The Martinezes fostered Mikel, then they legally adopted him on March 10. They gave him the middle name Gracen because, Janae says, “we feel like the grace of God brought him to us.”
Today, Mikel is an active 13-month-old toddler with wide range of interests, including pulling socks of out drawers, dancing, asking for kisses — or as he calls them, “besos” — and cuddling.
“He’s almost about to walk!” Chris says, proudly.
Chris and Janae are forever grateful to Mikel’s birth mother.
“What she did for Mikel was so brave and selfless,” Janae says. “We want her to know that we are going to give Mikel the best life — the life that he deserves. He’s such an amazing kid.”
