In Part 1, I shared how my husband and I made our decision to adopt children. We first became foster parents.
The day finally arrived when we received the call telling us that the next day we would receive our first foster baby. She was a newborn, and mother had admitted that she was using drugs. Linea (not her real name) was five weeks premature and weighed only five lbs. We picked her up at the hospital, this tiny little Filipino girl dressed all in pink. Her bonnet was too large for her head, and I could hardly find her amongst the blankets!
It was the strangest feeling to walk out of a hospital with someone else's child. We needed to stop by Sears on the way home and I thought for sure someone would take a look at our family and realize that this itty bitty bundle of a child did not belong to us. I was certain someone would call the police and say that they had spotted a family who had kidnapped a baby!
We had Linea with us for seven weeks. Her parents had done everything asked by the state in order to have their baby returned.
Our next two foster babies were boys. We had one of them for seven months before he had to move to another foster home due to some program rules. It was apparent that the boy's parents would never be able to do what they needed to in order get their children back. The boys were eventually put up for adoption. Did we want them?
Dear Man and I discussed it. We knew that we wanted to adopt boys as we already had two girls. We also knew that we wanted to adopt children younger than our girls because we didn't want an older child coming into the family making either of our girls feel like they had dropped down a notch in rank.
However one of the boys had some serious medical problems. While this had been a part of our job as foster parents, did we want to take on these special needs for good? The answer was yes. We loved him, special needs or not, and he was not going to be easy to place. We couldn't stand the thought of him in fostercare for a longer period of time.
I had orginally wanted to adopt a little girl from China, but Dear Man felt that there were children right here in the U.S. that needed a home just as much. There was also no way we could afford to adopt a baby from China or any other country for that matter. The Lord had worked it out to what was best for our family, despite my first desires!
Adopting a child out of fostercare is much cheaper and can be nearly free. The only thing we paid for was our background checks.
While adopting a child out of fostercare can be cheaper, it does not mean it will be easier. Read Part 3 to hear the rest of our adoption story.
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