Fire Inspection and... More Waiting

    Well, as of yesterday the fire inspection is finally completed.  Mike (I didn't catch his last name) came from the Perry Fire Department and we had a very pleasant, low-stress visit.  We toured the house, checked all the smoke detectors and Carbon Monoxide detectors, had a look at the furnace, water heater and electrical panel/breaker box filled out the paperwork and that was that.

    In the end, Mike had a few suggestions on where to hang our fire extinguishers and that we ought to move a few boxes (our house is still full of boxes from our move five months ago) away from a potential hazard.  Our paperwork is now (as far as I know) completed so we just need to mail some things into Guidestone (our agency) and then wait for our license to be updated.  How long that will take is anyone's guess but we were told at one point it might be up to four weeks.  How long we will wait for a placement after that is entirely in God's hands.

Now we wait...

                        ....again.

Classes finished... again

    For two evenings this week my wife and I attended classes to retrain on the American Heart Association method of CPR and First Aid.  It was not difficult nor was it unpleasant though, as it often has been in the past, it was a little slow.  I found the Heart Association class to be a fairly low stress affair after my experiences taking the Red Cross classes (CPR for the Professional Rescuer) when I was certified as a Life Guard.  Red Cross classes involved far more hands on application and more rigorous testing (including a fairly difficult written knowledge test that the Heart Association does not have at all).

    Clearly the Heart Association and the Red Cross (at least as I remember it) have vastly differing approaches to learning this.  On the other hand, the Red Cross class I took was for people who were expected to react instantly and to get it right the first time (lifeguards, firefighters, etc.) while the Heart Association class was really for foster parents and day care providers for whom, while the knowledge is important, what is needed first and foremost is enough knowledge to give them confidence so that they can provide care and call for professional care. After teaching for the Red Cross for more than two decades, my wife was unimpressed but I suppose both approaches are valid and have their place.

    In any case, our task for now is to turn in proof that we took the classes and then wait for our fire inspection in two weeks.  After that we're done and we wait some more for our new therapeutic foster home license to be approved.

Family Meetings and More Classes

    A week or two ago we had a family meeting to talk about Foster Care and adoption.  I had downloaded a blog (I can't remember where I got it now but probably from the Twitter feed from www.adoptuskids.org or adoptivefamilies.com) that listed things that you should talk about before bringing new kids into your house and into your family.  Our kids knew a lot of the things we talked about just because we've talked about it before and because they've been dealing with some of the same (post-adoption) issues themselves.  Naturally, our children think that our family is okay the way it is and they aren't fond of the idea of introducing more chaos to our house just when things seemed to be finally calming down a bit.    They do, however, accept that it is our decision to make and they trust that we love them and have the best interests of everyone in mind.

    One great question was how we could afford to have more children, particularly because they think that we are poor.  We really aren't poor although we are far from rich.  I left a better paying career some years ago to follow a calling that I felt on my life and while we get by on what I earn, we don't buy a lot of the toys that our friends have and our kids don't have all the things that their friends have.  Sometimes this is because we truly can't afford it, but often it is because we've chosen to live more simply.  Even so, how we will ever pay for college tuition is something of a mystery.  If all three of our children decide to pursue higher education, we will at some point have all of them in college at the same time.  At that point, the cost of tuition, even in a state university, will be more than my annual salary.  Our kids know that their choice of colleges will ultimately have less to do with preference and far more to do with affordability and financial aid packages.  While we know that foster kids come with a monthly stipend, we began this process with adoption in mind and have never considered this as a long-term source of income.

    Meanwhile, we have one more set of classes to take to complete our application to upgrade our foster care license.  Today and tomorrow we will take First Aid and CPR classes and then, in a couple weeks we will have our new fire inspection.  At that point we will be done and the paperwork submitted to the State of Ohio.  I was told recently that we should expect the licensing process to take about four weeks.

The End is Near?

As of now, our list of things needed to finish upgrading our license is getting pretty short.  We have finished the necessary classroom hours for training and all that remains is to get fingerprinted (again), get a fire inspection of our home, and take a first aid and CPR class.

I smile when I think of taking the first aid and CPR class because for many years of our marriage, my wife was my instructor.  For more than twenty years, my wife was a Red Cross instructor for Swimming, Lifeguarding, and Water Safety Instruction, as well as for First Aid and CPR.  For a number of years after we were married, I was a certified lifeguard and so I was required to take an annual re-certification for First Aid and CPR.  It's been a few years and I know that they have changed a few things, but I am genuinely looking forward to taking it.  Our only 'problem' is that with our current schedules and our children's schedules for band and sports, we can't find a class that will work for us until min-November.

Stay tuned.

Classes... again.

Spent a good portion of the day yesterday in a training seminar to upgrade our foster care license.  Interesting stuff and great to meet new foster-parents-in-training.  Making connections is always good so that you have someone to call when you need help.  If you are unfamiliar with foster parenting, what I mean is, foster children are not like your own.  As a foster-parent, you are licensed by the state to care for these kids and if you need to go somewhere and are unable to take your kids with you (say, the hospital or to see a sick relative) you can't just drop them off at your sister's house or even at your mom's.  Responsible adults like your sister and your mom (assuming they are as responsible as you and you'd trust them) can be listed as alternative care givers under certain circumstances, but unless they get their home inspected by the social workers and have a fire inspection like you did for your house, they would have to watch your foster children in your house.

That isn't going to work all that often.

As a result, it is good to make friends with other foster parents whose homes have been inspected and certified.  Then, in a pinch, you can watch their kids or they can watch yours and, as long as the agency is properly informed (know the rules of your county or agency), you're good to go.

Another Meeting and a New Direction

    At the end of last week we met with two fine folks from Guidestone, one we had met before and the other, a supervisor, was new to us.  During our discussion we determined that the types of children and level of disability that we had specified in our original application to Belmont County were acceptable to Guidestone and they felt that they had children in their care that would fit that description.  This was important to both of us but especially to me because I didn’t want to feel pressured to take in children that were more difficult than we had planned.    With this understanding we felt that we should continue toward our re-certification with Guidestone.

    Despite our new understanding regarding the type of children that we could expect, there was one new wrinkle.  Local county agencies refer children to Guidestone when they have children that are technically “more difficult.”   Although this still fits our original description, we now will have to upgrade our foster home certification to be a “therapeutic foster home” instead of a “family foster home.”  What that means is another twenty hours of training.   

Yippee…

Not much to report today except that the new agency that we are considering, Guidestone, has received copies of all of our paperwork from Belmont County (at least as much as they are allowed to copy) and is will be visiting us later this week.  I guess we'll see how many thing will need to be re-done and if that list is longer or shorter than the list that we had from Stark County.  The process is taking longer than I thought that it would but on the other hand, my pessimistic side suspected that moving would throw a wrench into the works and might take six months to work out.  Still, even then I though that it might be six months before we had a child placed in our home, not that it would take six months to satisfy the paper tigers.

Hopefully, I will have more news next week...

First Impressions

    It’s been too long since I wrote anything here.  A couple weeks ago we attended a training session mandated by our new county.  Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.  The staff and the other families were as nice as I anyone could have asked for, but that wasn’t really the problem.  If we back up another week we encounter the problem.  Before we left Belmont County we completed all of the training required by them and by the State of Ohio and were certified as foster parents.  We understood that, since we would be in a new home, we would need to have another home visit and another fire inspection.  The problem is that when we contacted our new county agency, we were told that we would also have to take several additional classes, rewrite our home-study and provide copies of the home-studies that were done for our first two adoptions thirteen and fifteen years ago. 

    We’ve all heard about first impressions and these were not good ones.  We weren’t too happy about some of the new requirements and wished them luck with the last one.  We sure don’t have copies of our old home-studies (or if we do they are buried so deep in our box pile they may not be found until our children go sort through our stuff when they put me in a nursing home), I’m not sure the agencies that wrote them retain records that long, and at least one of the social workers that wrote them died ten years ago.

   As I said, we went to the first class the new agency required and it wasn’t bad.  It was all about the rules they expected us to follow.  Many rules were the same as Belmont County, some were new and a few were just explained better.  Some of the things that we learned weren’t especially welcome.  The county was fairly clear that although you have the chance to express your preferences, when they select you for a particular foster child you may not get the chance to review their file first and it would count against you (as in, it would impact your ability to be offered foster children in the future) if you refused a child that was offered.  One other item did not go over especially well with us.  Our new county requires an exclusivity agreement.  If anyone is certified by them they insist upon exclusive “rights” to them as foster parents for a minimum of one year.  If you choose to change agencies in less than one year, the (taxpayer supported, public) agency will bill you for the expenses they incurred in getting your certification.  We thought this was unusual and we mentioned it to a couple other social workers that we know.  Neither had ever heard of such a thing.  Again, not a great first impression.

    Surprisingly, at the same time that we were discussing these negative first impressions, I had a surprise visitor at my office at church.  A representative from Guidestone, a private foster care/adoption agency stopped by the church to meet the new pastor (me) and to see if she could come and speak for a few minutes about their agency some Sunday morning.  Since Guidestone is essentially an agency of the United Methodist Church, this was a reasonable request.  The surprising thing was the timing.  My wife and I had already discussed the possibility of meeting with them to discuss options particularly because of our first impressions at our county agency.  The end result has been that we’ve deliberately slowed the pace of re-certification with the county (since we don’t want to have to pay them for their services if we choose to go elsewhere) and we are looking more deeply into what it would take to re-certify with Guidestone instead.

    All in all, the process is taking longer than we thought it would, is more difficult that it ought to be, and now we are not so sure that foster care is something we want to pursue long-term.  Instead we are feeling that foster-to-adopt as a deliberate path to adoption may be the best course for us.   The adventure continues…

Did Advertising Influence our Decsion to Adopt?

    For some time now I have been following the Twitter feed of AdoptUSKids and before that I would occasionally drift back to their website (www.adoptuskids.org) and page through the photo listings of the children who were available for adoption and who are just waiting for a family to call their own.  The state of Ohio (and most other states) has a similar list (http://www.adoptionphotolistingohio.org) that I also have spent time paging through.  In both of these lists I have been overcome by the sheer number of children.  When looking at photographs and biographies of these children I have just had to stop when I realized that there were 260 pages to look at, each with 15 photographs and some of those were sibling groups and not just one child.  To get my hands around these numbers I made regular use of the search tools to filter the search results using all sorts of criteria.  I’ve searched by state, by gender, by race, by age, and I would have searched using other criteria if could.  For obvious reasons of safety and privacy the general public cannot search using religion or other personal information.  Once our homestudy is complete and in our hands (which should be any day now), we can register with AdoptUSKids and gain access to additional information about the children we are interested in.  At this point, I am uncertain just how much information will be made available to us when that happens.

    This week Adopt US Kids tweeted this question, “Did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?” and asked folks to share their stories through www.humaninterestfilms.com.  As I explained in my blog post, Why Now?, we always thought we’d have more children but, for a variety of reasons, the time was never right, until now.  For some time, years in fact, whenever things would begin to look like our lives might be making a way for us to think about kids again, I would find myself returning to the photo listings and imagining what it would be like to add another child to our family or what sort of child would fit our already quirky collective.  When we finally made the decision to get serious about adopting again, we were still looking at the photo lists and each week when AdoptUSKids would tweet a new pair of featured children, I would click on the link and have a look.

    So did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?  Well, it probably wasn’t TV or radio, and we didn’t see too many ads in the newspaper, but the Internet had a lot to do with keeping us connected and sustaining our interest in adoption.  It hasn’t happened yet of course.  We expect to receive our completed homestudy in the next two weeks (and then get it revised after we move) and then we will see where the road takes us.   Whatever happens, the State of Ohio, AdoptUSKids, Twitter, and others have certainly had some influence on getting us to this place.

Countdown

    We are coming to the end of two separate countdowns.  First is our upcoming move.  With only five days left to pack before we leave for our church's Annual Conference and then moving day only two days after our return, we're trying to get everything done before Saturday.  So far we've taken three trailer loads of stuff to the new house and my wife has planted some tomato plants (at the new place).  My office is packed, and several rooms at home are completed (or nearly so).  This week is the final push and then when we return from conference we can finish up a (hopefully) few final details.

    The second countdown is toward finishing our homestudy.  Today Jennifer returned for her third (and possibly final) visit to our home  - despite the chaos and boxes everywhere - to meet our children and to interview them.  This was their big chance to speak their minds about how they felt about us inviting foster children into our home or if they had feelings about having a new, forever family, brother or sister.  Since I wasn't needed for this interview I stayed at work trying to wrap up details here.  From what I've heard so far, the only concern was that if we had more kids, we might not have enough money.  From our kids perspective, we're poor, because we won't buy them all the toys and gadgets that their friends have (and which, in their minds, we ought to have too).  In reality, although we're not rich, we are certainly not poor.  We have enough for what we need even though we know that getting kids through college in a few years is going to be more than a little challenging.

    It seems that we are on target to get our move done at the end of the month and also that on moving day we will take with us a completed homestudy.  At least that is our hope and that is what we are praying for.  At the risk of repeating myself, once we are settled into our new home, we will then contact Children's Services in our new county to update the homestudy and we should be ready to go wherever this crazy adventure is leading us.

Second homestudy visit/thoughts on "The Process"

    Yesterday, we had our second visit by our social worker, Jennifer.  Once again we answered a bunch of questions but, again, none of them seemed to be terribly intrusive (more on that later).  We answered questions, filled out a few new forms and we gave Jennifer a copy of our floor plan/fire escape plan as well as our fire inspection that we completed last week.  After completing the paperwork portion of our meeting we gave her a brief tour of our home despite the boxes and ongoing evidence of packing for the move to our new home at the end of June (only four weeks left to pack - Yikes!).

    The first time that we had a homestudy, probably fifteen or sixteen years ago, I remember thinking that the process seemed extraordinarily intrusive.  I remember thinking that many of the questions seemed very personal and that I was very uncomfortable giving out highly detailed private financial information.  A decade and a half later it doesn't seem to be that big a deal but I am not entirely sure why.  I suppose that, in part, as a society we have become accustomed to having a little less privacy than we once did.  Combine that with out constant exposure to Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, text messages and other immediate news sources we, perhaps, feel that more people already know an awful lot about us and our private lives.  Mostly, however, I think it is simply that while fifteen years ago we had never given that sort of information out to anyone but our closest family (especially financial information) but in the intervening years we have given this information out many times for unemployment benefits, Medicaid benefits (while unemployed and underemployed), applications for state funded subsidies for counseling related to Reactive Attachment Disorder, financial aid applications, and employment related background checks.  While I am still not a big fan of giving someone (anyone) a detailed list of our assets and income, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it did the first time.

    Still, be forewarned, if you are thinking of adopting or getting licensed for foster care, or if you have already begun that process, you will be asked to give out information about yourself that you may never have given out to anyone, even your parents or closest friends.  For us, it was not, and is not, a deal killer.  Uncomfortable?  Yes.  But the folks at Children's Services are decent, trustworthy people.  They have a real "need to know" this kind of stuff and they do a good job of keeping your private information private.  If I were you, I wouldn't let a little discomfort stop me from attaining one of life's most worthwhile goals.

    Trust me, despite all of the hassles and difficulties we've had raising our three kids over the last fifteen years, and despite all the trips to see counselors (and doctors, and orthodontists, etc.) there is nothing that I wouldn't do over again in a heartbeat.  Our kids are so awesome, and I am so proud of them, that I can never express it adequately in words.  If you are thinking of adoption, or if you have already started, do not let the process prevent you from reaching your goal.

Press on.

Persevere.

It will all be worth it in the end.

Homestudy News

    This week has been busy for us as we continue to pack but also to clean so that we can complete several tours and inspections that are needed for a variety of reasons.  First, we invited Ted, the pastor that will succeed me after we leave, and his family to come on Monday to have lunch, tour the house and to meet some of the teachers and coaches that will be important in their daughter’s life next year.  On Tuesday Jennifer, our social worker from Children’s Services, visited us to begin our homestudy and then in the afternoon our local fire chief stopped by to complete the fire inspection for our homestudy.  We still anticipate one more visit from the church trustees as they look over the house before we change pastors so that we can discuss what maintenance issues might need to be addressed as a part of the transition and in the coming months.

    We have also learned that most of our references have completed the required paperwork and have returned it to Jennifer.  All this means that so far, we are on track to complete our homestudy before we move to Stark County.  Again, our hope is that instead of starting over with a new county, this means that we will be able to simply ask Stark County to update our homestudy to reflect our new address (which of course will mean a visit from a new social worker as well as a new fire inspection), new church and new school.  All in all, still a complicated process but probably less than trying to start over again from square one.

    Tomorrow, we have to go to Cleveland Clinic for a check-up, to Akron for a funeral and to Newcomerstown for our district track meet.  Next week, Jennifer will come again for another visit, the first of the moving companies will come to give us an estimate, the kids will have their last day of school, and our daughter will run in the regional track meet.  I’m afraid that our lives will be lived at pretty much a dead run until after we move and maybe until school starts again in the fall.  In any case, hopefully by the time school starts we will be fully 'homestudied' and ready to bring home a new family member!  

That is still a both exciting and terrifying idea.  Change doesn't come easily to any of us and our family has been constant at the five of us for almost fourteen years.  I keep thinking of a line from the "Little Rascals" television show many years ago when the kid's coaster car was careening wildly down a gigantic hill.  In the midst of their excitement and fear, Stymie said, "I don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"  I can relate.

Pre-Service Completed (honest!)

    This past Thursday my wife and I traveled several counties over to take our last pre-service class.  During the classes offered in our own county, we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary and had planned a short get-a-way together.  As a result, we missed one class and had to attend a make-up class with another county.  As we often do, we planned our route using Yahoo! Maps.  Normally this map program seriously overestimates how long it will take to travel but even so we added an extra half-hour to be sure we would be on time.  We stopped only once for fuel and to grab a hot dog (also at the gas station) but somehow still managed to find ourselves running late.  We did manage to make it to class within the required window (you can only miss 15 minutes of the class in order to be counted for attendance).

    The class that we attended was on Preventing and De-escalating Crisis (session 6).  The class was very informative and we were impressed by the instructor and appreciated her personal experiences adopting from the Foster System.  We also found something more unexpected.  As I noted earlier, we had made friends with the folks with whom we had spent seven weeks with in class but we really anticipated that for this make-up, we would just sort of drop in and take off.  Instead, what we found was another class full of folks who, though very different from one another and who were there for a variety of reasons, were still connected through a common bond of their love for children and the desire to make a difference.  On top of that, before we left, we made another friend or two.  During the class and afterward, we found ourselves in conversation with another couple.  While we had thought that everyone would leave after the class was over, this couple wanted to continue to talk and get to know one another better.

    We have also made a call to our social worker at Jobs and Family Services and let her know that we have completed the pre-service training.  With that step behind us, she is now planning our home visits and some additional paperwork (physical forms, vet forms for the pets, etc) so that she will be able to finish our home study before July.  My wife and I are still somewhat unsure of where this new adventure will lead us.  We began thinking that we only wanted to consider adoption but now that we have taken the classes and learned so much (both from the instructors and from the other parents) we are planning to be certified as foster parents as well.  I remain a little uncertain about how we will do in the long-term.  I have no doubt that we have something to contribute, that our family can make room for a few more and that we have enough love to share nor do I have any doubt that we can make a difference in the life of a child.  My only doubts are how we will be able to hold up when a child we have cared for is allowed to return home to his (or her) birth-parents.  I suppose that there will be a joy in seeing a family reunited, but what feelings of loss will we feel as well?

    Please pray with us as we consider where God might be leading in this new adventure.

Pre-Service Classes Completed (sort of)

    This week we finished our required pre-service training with Belmont County and received the forms that we will need to fill out so that Jobs and Family Services (JFS) can begin to do our home-study.  I guess technically we still have one more class to take since we missed one when we went away for a week to celebrate our 20^th wedding anniversary, but we plan to make that up in Zanesville this Thursday.  Either way, we have the forms and we spent some time this weekend filling them out.  Today my wife was to either drop the forms off at JFS or (if time was short) drop them in the mail.  Our hope is that we can complete the home-study before the end of June when we will be moving to Stark County (more on that in a future post).  If the home-study is complete, then all that “should” need to happen after we move is to have a visit or two from the Stark County JFS to add and addendum to bring it up-to-date with our new house, employer, etc.  Even though we’ve been taking these classes for six or seven weeks, suddenly it seems more real.  Once the home-study is done we will be certified to adopt and licensed as foster parents.  This is both frightening and exiting at the same time.  A new adventure begins.

    As I said, we have completed six or seven weeks of pre-service classes with several other couples from around Belmont County.  At first, I wanted to be sort of anonymous, just for people to know my name but not much about me but as we got to know the other couples in the class, that began to change.  For those of you who haven’t been through this process before (and even though we’ve adopted before, that was thirteen years ago and this was new to us too), getting a home-study through the county requires that you attend twelve three hour pre-service training classes.  Each county has their own way of doing this and you can attend anywhere in the state at your convenience as the curriculum is the same.  Belmont County was convenient to us (except for our anniversary) so we attended there every Tuesday and Thursday for the last seven weeks (there was an ‘extra’ week because we skipped a Thursday during Easter week).  When we started, we weren’t really thinking very hard about being foster parents but were primarily thinking about adding a child or two to our family through adoption.  As the weeks and the classed rolled on however, both my wife and I began to think that becoming foster parents might just be something that we would consider. 

    

    As I understand it, being licensed as a foster parent isn’t a requirement and, in some places, we might not have been required to attend those specific classes but that isn’t how Belmont County does things.  What they have seen over the years are too many adoptive parents who adopt a child and then, for a variety of reasons, find themselves wishing they had been licensed as foster parents.  Likewise, they have seen many foster parents who care for children who become available for adoption, and then have to return to the classes to get permission to adopt.  Their solution is simply to require that everyone take all of the classes.  Of course, having done so, everyone is permitted to do as they wish, no one is required to become a foster parent or an adoptive parent if they don’t want to, but under this system no additional classes are needed if you change your mind later.

    I began the pre-service classes with every intention of remaining sort of anonymous but, after spending six hours a week for six weeks together we began to become friends with the couples (and one single) who were in class with us.  I was initially reluctant to let anyone know that I am a pastor.  Not because I was doing anything embarrassing, but simply because I find that sometimes I get treated differently and I had hoped that by remaining somewhat anonymous, at least for the duration of the class, I might ‘fit in’ and not get any kind of special treatment.  I don’t think I needed to worry.  Everyone in our class was great.  We are all quite different from one another but we all have a desire to make life better for children in crisis.  Another reason for remaining somewhat anonymous was simply the size or our county and the size of our small towns.  So far, no one really knows that we are headed down this road.  As I mentioned earlier, we were hoping to minimize the number of questions raised by our parents until we, at least, had the home-study completed.  In our small town there are several folks who, although they don’t know our parents directly, are connected to people who do.  We know that once this news (and in our village this would be news) is out, it won’t be long until our parents find out.  It won't be much longer anyway since I asked my brother to be one of our references for our home-study.  I asked him not to tell our parents, but at this point I assume that we tell our family before June is over.

Why Now?

The next obvious question to address is "Why now?"  Why, with three children, who will all be in high school in the fall, would we want to add to our family now?  Simply put, the time seemed right.  From the beginning of our marriage more than twenty years ago we discussed how many children that we thought we might want.  I came from a family of six (with three brothers) and my wife from a family of five (with one brother and one sister) and as we discussed what we wanted in a family we thought that four or five was probably about right.  At the time we were married and starting a family, one of my brothers had seven children.  There’s nothing wrong with that and I have always admired his ability (and his wife, of course) to pull it off but we both agreed that seven, for us, was probably too many.  For us, five seemed like the right number.

    So what happened?  Why stop at three?  It is apparent to anyone who meets us that we only have three children.  We started our family and then suddenly stopped two years later.  Why?  There are several answers.  The first is simply what parents around the world have discovered throughout the centuries, that boys are harder than girls.  If our boys had been as easy to parent as our daughter had been, we probably would have had six or seven children by now but that isn't the way it happened.  Parenting boys turned out to be much different, and far more difficult, than parenting one daughter.  The numbers contributed to this as well.  When we decided to adopt a second time, we began by contacting an adoption attorney.  There, we created a life book for potential birth-mothers to look at and, hopefully, choose us as adoptive parents and then we waited.  I don't remember how long we waited but I'm guessing that we waited for about a year with no nibbles of interest.  At about the same time we became introduced to a woman who had adopted from Russia and was launching a new adoption service in Medina, Ohio.  Although it took another year to grind through the process and the paperwork to go to Russia, we chose to stop waiting for a birth-mother and go that route (although these two avenues overlapped for a while).

    I said that numbers contributed to stopping at three and they did.  We chose to adopt two children from Russia at once rather than trying to fund two trips overseas.  We applied for, and expected, a boy and a girl six months to a year apart in age.  Instead, after we applied we were told that twin boys were available and we were asked if we would consider adopting both of them so that they could stay together.  We had entered the process of adoption not only as an adventure but also as something of a spiritual journey.  During that time we saw God's hand in some amazing ways, but for this story it's enough to say that we had asked, and expected God to lead us to the children that he had in mind for us so when we were offered twin boys, after a few short prayers we gladly accept their offer and felt that God's hand was in it.  The part that numbers played was simply that not only are boys more difficult to parent than girls, but twins are way harder than one child alone.
It took a while, but we discovered something else.  For a long time the thing didn't have a name but it was still there nonetheless.  All we knew at first was that parenting these boys was harder than it should have been.  We eventually noticed that many of the 'normal' parenting advice and 'normal' parenting methods just didn't work on these little guys.  Everyone said that kids who had lived in an orphanage would have delays but if you just loved them enough, they would catch up and eventually thrive.  Some of that was true, but in other ways something just wasn't right.  We found our way to counselors and went that route for quite a while but it didn't seem to be making much of a difference until we heard about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  I'm not exactly sure how we found them but we eventually discovered Dr. Gregory Keck and the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio.  From the moment we found their website we knew we were onto something.  The sample questions that they had on the application sounded more like our boys than anything we had ever seen.  When we finally met Dr. Keck and talked to him he asked us questions about the boys that he couldn't possibly have known, and yet he knew things about them and about their behavior that were dead-on accurate.  Finally, the thing had a name.

What had happened was that, as much as we loved our boys, they were more than just a handful to raise.  They absolutely consumed all of the energy we had available to parent them.  During this same time, my wife was going through some significant health challenges.  Taken together, for a bunch of years, three children was all that we could handle.   After several years of counseling and after many of my wife's health problems had been overcome, we finally felt like it was time to grow our family again.

Why Here? Why Now? Why Anonymous?

    My wife and I have been adoptive parents for fifteen years.  We adopted first from China in 1996 and then from Russia two years later.  First a daughter and then twin sons.  With all that behind us, why start a blog now?  Simply put, after all this time, for a lot of different reasons, we thought it might be time to start down that road again.  right now we're not sure where this new adventure will lead us.  In fact, we haven't even told our parents just yet (although our children know).  For this last reason, at least for the time being, I will remain anonymous.  Adoption is a lot like pregnancy (not that I would know, personally) in that people are full of all sorts of questions and at this moment, because we aren't really sure where this new adventure will lead us, there are questions that we know our parents will ask that we just aren't prepared to answer... yet.

    Having said all of that, I'm glad you found your way here.  I have often wished that I had kept a journal (or a blog) of our experiences during our first adoptions that I could share with my children and others.  This time, before we get caught up in legal stuff, the endless waiting, the emotional roller coaster and all the other things that we know will come, I wanted to start writing.  In upcoming posts I will explain more about how we got to be where we are and why we decided after all this time, that perhaps it was time to try again.    Years ago on the television show, Little Rascals, as their coaster car careened wildly down a gigantic hill, one of the characters famously said, "I don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"  That pretty much sums up how I feel at the moment.  So, consider this to be an invitation of sorts.  I'm not sure where this adventure will take us, but you are invited to come along for the ride.