Our Adoption Story...
It was fall of 2004, when I was watching an Oprah Winfrey Show that unveiled the inhumane stories that were taking place in South Africa. The show educated the public and myself of an epidemic where babies as young as 5 months are being raped. There is a myth being spread in Africa that if you have sex with a virgin you will then become cured from AIDS. Consequently children, infants were being robbed of their humanity. This story broke me. My heart began to grieve for them and desire to give life to soul that had been lost. I struggled with this for a month or so. Finally I broke down and told Carlos that I want to adopt. At this time I was thinking in our future, after our biological children were raised. Then we could adopt a child whose soul has been stripped from them and build them back to who God intended them to be. Carlos was 100% on board from day one.
It was not but a month later Carlos and I were watching Oprah (again) and she did a special on orphanages in China. This time Carlos was moved. He began talking about adopting a girl from China. We still were thinking that this was later in our future, not now. Shortly after these two shows Carlos had a dream that made him question why we were waiting to adopt. Why not now? When he told me about the dream we talked about it and decided that we would look into the process. We have always wanted 4 children and we loved the idea of having our adopted child be right in the middle of our biological children. We decided to begin the process!
Carlos and I have followed Steven Curtis Chapman and have seen his presentation on adoption, so we decided to start with his organization. We trusted in the agencies he was recommending. We started with his list and one by one the doors were closed. We didn’t know that there were so many requirements of the parents. We looked into Africa but at that time non of his agencies adopted from Africa. We then looked into China but they had a requirement was that both parents had to be 30 and I was not 30 yet.
Those were our two countries that were on our heart, at that point we didn’t know where were going to adopt from. We only had one final agency to look into. We were feeling sad and defeated. Maybe our decision to adopt now was not right. Our final agency to look into was Holt International. We began to read their requirements and we matched perfectly with Korea. We matched their requirements and they matched ours. Korea it was.
We began the application and attended the first class. We were excited to learn that we would be adopting a boy. We just naturally thought we would be adopting a little girl just because we had 2 girls of our own, plus the two adoption stories on Oprah were based on girls. So it was an exciting shock to hear that Korea favors mixed gender families and that they would be place with a boy.
The application took longer than we had expected. There were a few bumps in the process but finally things got well on our way. We were assigned to Losiah in July of 2006! Here is the post from Carlos' blog on the day we were assigned to him...
So
Heather and I have been waiting for our “assignment” to come from South
Korea. Waiting for months to find out who will be joining our family. I
am sitting in a Days Inn parking lot in Oakhurst, CA because we just
got a phone call from our social worker that we have been assigned.
PRAISE GOD!!! God is shining bright upon us right now. We are overjoyed.
Ragamuffins.
Meet MY SON…Baek Dae-Selok (Korean Name)
His new name will be Losiah. 
We are unsure as to which Korean names to incorporate. We will decide soon,
God is Good,
Los
The final months before we traveled to pick him up, were filled with fund raisers, preparing, and lots and lots of stress!
With the assurance God gave us about this decision, we also had peace that he will also provide the means to pay for this child. From the beginning God knew our income and we have to believe that if he is leading us to this decision he will lead us in the financial aspect of this process too. And he did. We had 61 cents in our savings when we entered into this decision and because of our family and friends and a couple of grants we were able to pay for all the expenses that came our way.
We finally got the call to go pick up our boy in November. We did have a few more bits of drama before that wonderful call came. He was coming home!
I think you will be able to spend hours reading our story, if you don't have time for them all look at this post and watch these two, they are my favorite. If you have a day or two... start on Carlos' blog and go to November 2006 and enjoy. It is quite the story!
Wow, that was a lot of info! Thanks for hanging on! I could go on and on. I would love to answer any questions you have so ask away. I also would love to hear your stories, if you are or think you are going to adopt lets make a carnival of this. If you are or thinking about adopting, tell us your story.
It's simple,
1. Write your story on your blog and link to this post in yours.
2. Come back here and enter our URL into Mr. Linky below.
I really look forward to seeing pictures and hearing your stories. H
Recent Comments