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.