Speaking of National Adoption Awareness Month...

Well, friends 'n neighbors, it's been a long road, with many a detour into dead ends and blind alleys.



Many of you, most likely most of you, have been praying us through this process - some for a short while, some on the order of years.



Troy once stated that the love - the true, Christian love shown him by his friends when Estella left him would echo throughout eternity, and would be forever stamped on his memory that there exists, in this messed up, dysfunctional family of God that we are, a great capacity to care and to show love to those in need.


You all, in your own special ways, have done that for us, and we are truly eternally grateful.


Aww, c'mon, cut to the chase! What's with the cryptic title of this post?



Ahh, yes. The title of this post is "Speaking of National Adoption Awareness Month..." (hey, by the way, has anyone ever noticed how many ellipses I use in my writing? I'm like an ellipsoidaholic. I also tend to wander off on tangents when I write, but especially when I speak...)



To quote the crowd in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail,

GET ON WITH IT!!!


Okay, okay, okay.


Our most recent hope for adoption, Jenny T. (many of you knew her from Bethany), is a complete bust. It turns out that she's exactly as flaky as we feared, and even more so. Here's the scoop there:

A few weeks ago, we both had pretty much decided that trying to adopt via the Northwest Adoption Exchange was not going to work out for us. The states involved with NWAE (Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho) all maintain online listings with photographs of what are termed "high needs" children. Some of the high needs kids are classified as such due to disabilities, some are due to aberrant behaviors, but others are put into that classification simply because they belong to a sibling group that the state would rather not separate. It's far easier to adopt out a single child than one with a brother or sister or two or three.

As one might expect, those children who have the fewest problems are the ones most sought-after, even those who are in sibling groups. We actively pursued three different sibling groups: two groups of three girls (both from Oregon) and one brother and sister in Iowa (many other states, though not part of the NWAE, list their own children).

The two sibling groups in Oregon were basically problem-free, meaning they were in high demand. For one set, there were over 50 inquiries; for the other, over 60. To place an inquiry on a child up for adoption in Oregon, one must have a completed home study and be actively working with a social worker, who advocates for you. Our home study (at that time) was still written to reflect an international adoption, which meant that, even if our social worker could rewrite it at lightning speed and overnight it down to us, we'd still be at the bottom of a stack of 50-60 families.

In a word, pretty hopeless.


In the midst of all this, I felt led to try to contact Jenny. (I had tried to reach her back in September when we were moving forward with our first adoption that we ended up walking away from, but her phone was disconnected). I got ahold of her dad, who told me she'd moved to...Idaho, of all places. About eight hours from us.

I spoke with her once for a few minutes, in which she fed me a long series of excuses about not contacting me, and told me that she did want to talk to me at length about the adoption (that she still wanted to go through with, she asserted), but she was feeling rather poorly, and would need me to call back in a few days.

This led to two weeks of playing phone tag with her, but I was always "it," if you know what I mean.

Every time I'd call, I'd get another excuse why she couldn't talk to me. See, she, her husband, and their five kids are all living with the mother of a friend of hers (which must just be a really fun household). This lady, in my opinion, would essentially lie to me, playing coverup for Jenny.

Now, that kind of pisses me off, y'know?

If you're not ready to talk to me, tell me "I'm not ready to talk right now. Let's talk about this in two weeks. My emotions are all over the map right now."

Anyway, I finally got her husband on the phone, and he told me that, despite everything Jenny had told me, and despite everything that logic told me, they had decided to keep this sixth baby.

Of course, that's their prerogative.

Frankly, it's probably better to be away from that situation.

She lied to me on several occasions, and that's just plain not the kind of person I want to adopt a baby from. If she'd lie to me about, say, telling her parents about the pregnancy (she told me they only found out a couple weeks ago, but when I spoke with her father, he told me he'd known since this summer), isn't it plausible to think she might be lying when she tells me she's, for example, not doing any drugs while pregnant?

It all leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth - after all, I've known this woman since she was 13 years old.

After that final sucker punch, Katrina and I decided that the best course of action would be to go back to square one in our adoption process. Square one for us was state foster care adoption.

In early 2002, we started foster parenting classes, but decided not to get licensed after spending twenty hours hearing horror story upon horror story about man's inhumanity to child.

The rules have changed somewhat since 2002. Now, only the primary caregiver must attend classes (in this case, Katrina). And, the class hours have increased - now it's something on the order of 30 hours.

Katrina spent the last two weeks attending classes four nights a week, and going to class all day last Saturday.

What this would do for us is get us foster care licensed, which means we'd be first in line to adopt any baby placed in our home. We can choose which babies we'd take, and which ones we'd be willing to adopt. Babies who have been, say, removed from their parents due to neglect, but otherwise are developing normally, with no birth defects, would be primary candidates for us to adopt.

Many people take this route to adoption - it just took us nearly three years to come back to it.


So, Kat went to class all last week, and last Saturday, had a non-class day on Monday (I ended up staying home sick that day with pinkeye), and went to class on Tuesday. That same day, at school, I got a phone call in the afternoon.

From our lawyer.

Our lawyer, Marie.

Our lawyer, Marie, who has copies of our "birth mom" letters.


Our lawyer, Marie, who has copies of our "birth mom" letters, and had shared them with a birth mother the day before.


Okay, I'm tired of writing, so here goes:

Terilynn is 34 and a pre-med student, and is pregnant by her Marine ex-boyfriend. She has decided that having a child would not work for her at this stage of her life, namely, starting medical school next fall. She came to Marie because she'd been a client of Marie's firm before (she was represented by them in an auto accident some years ago), told Marie her dilemma, and began to describe for Marie the kind of family she'd want to adopt her baby.

Marie told me Terilynn described us.


Soooooo...we met with her at Marie's office this afternoon, and I think things might just work out this time.

She doesn't want an open adoption, like Tammy (our previous birth mother) wanted. She wants pictures now and again, but, in her words, she "doesn't want to parent this child," because that would be our job. As I said, she didn't come in asking for a wad of cash, also something Tammy did (although I still believe in my heart of hearts that Tammy wasn't trying to rip us off, but that she was trying to feather her nest, however).

Terilynn, as I said, is 34, but doesn't look much more than 24. She is, in a word, beautiful - Mediterranean features dominate her profile. She told us her mother's heritage is German, while her father's is Portuguese/Italian/Greek. She has the long, luxurious, curly, black hair that only women of that particular part of the world can grow. And, get this: she was born in Orange, California, but moved to the Northwest at the age of 2 or 3.

So, that's basically it. I'm thinking this one may just go through. She's healthy, she takes incredible care of herself (being a pre-med student, one would hope so), she's a Christian, and she wants us to have this baby.

Oh, yes - her due date is early June, so we've got a while to go here.

But I thought you'd all like to know.