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.