When we were doing our home study to adopt Esther, we initially wanted to adopt an older child. Neither one of us feels that experiencing infancy is necessary to feeling like a family, and neither one of us thinks it's just that older children who need families get passed over in favor of babies. However, due to various circumstances, we ended up requesting a healthy infant. We were referred our dearly beloved Esther, and are so blessed to be her family!
We still felt the urge to adopt an "older" child, though, so we resigned ourselves to waiting a long time for our next adoption so that we could request a child who was "older" but still younger than Esther. But as we got to know Esther and see how adaptable and social she is, we (or at least I!) began to picture her with an older sibling, and to wonder if that might work after all. I researched, as best I could, the reasons why out-of-birth-order adoption is sometimes discouraged, and I concluded that if we got a child who was enough older than Esther that they occupied very different ecological niches in the family, maybe she wouldn't feel displaced. Or at least, no more displaced than any only child feels when a new baby comes along!
I didn't see us adopting that child from China, though. We definitely wanted another Chinese child, so Esther won't be a minority within her family, but information available on "waiting children" in China is limited and not always accurate. We feel that our first responsibility at this point is to keeping Esther safe and developing in a healthy way, and we specifically wanted an older child who had a track record--that we could verify!--of interacting appropriately with younger children. Besides, since we adopted Esther, China has added some new requirements for adoptive parents, and there was one that no matter how many times we did the math, we were well short of meeting. So, I thought, how about adopting an older child from the U.S. foster care system, where we can actually talk to the foster parents and make sure that the child's past behavior has not posed any danger to younger children in the house. Then once we met all of China's requirements again, we could revisit our original plan and add an "older" child from China who would be younger than Esther. Tim and I talked about it, and he agreed in theory to having three children instead of two. But in our Maryland apartment we really didn't have enough space to put another child and their belongings, we couldn't afford a bigger apartment, and anyway, we kept thinking we might move in the next year, which would not have worked at all if we were in the middle of a foster-adopt placement. So I waited...and enjoyed Esther... and daydreamed of an older sibling.
When Tim got the job offer that moved us to our current town, one of the things that I got excited about was that we were finally going to stay put long enough to adopt! And the housing market is a lot less (a LOT less) expensive, so we could afford a bigger place! Even before we moved, I researched adoption agencies in our new state and picked out which one we would use. Once we were settled in our new house, had unpacked enough that I felt like I could function, and had gotten into the rhythm of Tim's new job, I started filling out this agency's application form. I figured that we could take care most of our home study requirements in the fall, do our required training in the winter, and be approved in the spring, hopefully in time for a summer placement. I shared my plan with Tim, and he was much less enthused than I. Was I sure this older child adoption thing could work out well? It was okay in theory, but work was so busy, and Esther was too young to understand what was going on, and maybe it would be better to wait for another year.
Literally a day or two after this conversation, we got (drumroll, please!) The E-mail. It was generated by a woman who, two years ago, had adopted a child from the orphanage in the city where we used to live in China. While she was there meeting her daughter, the director had pulled her into her office to plead for her help in finding a family for an older boy who had the same disability as her new daughter. Two years later, she had just found his file listed with a U.S. adoption agency, and was following through on her promise to advocate for him if she could locate him. He was close to aging out (orphans in China are considered unadoptable once they pass their 14th birthday), so time was short. She had sent the e-mail to (among other places) the yahoo group for that child's orphanage. It went from there to a woman who has visited that orphanage a number of times as part of her ministry as a globe-trotting Christian clown. She in turn forwarded the e-mail to all her China connections, including Tim. (Mind you, we met this person on two occasions, several years ago, and hadn't been in contact since.) I read the e-mail first, and offered up a prayer for this child. Tim read it and said, "I know this is crazy, but do you think we could even get our paperwork in on time?"
*To be continued...*
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