Warning! Please Read With Lots of Grace!

Dear Family and Friends,

This is something that we don't necessarily want to say and cannot say to each of you individually. Please read, only if you can give us lots of grace. Deep breath, here goes.. 

Adopting a preschool-age child is very different from bringing a newborn home from the hospital, but there are some similarities: You want everyone to come to the (hospital) airport to see your new child. That is the same. You want the house quiet, calm, low stimulus. That is the same. You want to limit visitors for the first several weeks. That is the same.

The similarities end there. Our son will hardly know his new mom and dad. We will be taking him on a long flight and leaving behind his loving caregivers and friends. He will no longer be sharing a bunk with his friends, but a room with his brother. He has never seen snow or felt the cold Ohio air. The language, the smells, the customs and routines will all be new. (Imagine being taken by strangers, somewhere you have never been where everything is different.) He needs time to get to know us and trust us. He needs to know that family members are safe to love and love deeply. 

Our son is almost 5 years old. We do know pieces of what his life has been like until now and the circumstances surrounding his adoption. Though it is a encouraging testimony of God's grace, we are choosing to save the details of his story for him to share, when he chooses. 

After talking with other adoptive families from our community and other areas, and at the advice of adoption professionals, this is our plan: Once we arrive home we will be going very few places with our son and staying home as much as we feel we can for about 3 weeks to 1 month. (Disclaimer: Of course our older kids will still be involved in their activities and we may even try to sneak into them with him.) This is our time as a family to adjust to new family dynamics. High nurture and high structure are our goals. After this time, we will begin branching out a bit, but will still minimize our outside contacts until we see that he is feeling more secure in this new context. 

Thank you in advance for your understanding and respect of how important these next few months are for our family. We want to start off doing what is best for our son though parts may be difficult for the rest of us. We look forward to continuing to share life with all of you, with our whole family!!!

Doug and Shannon Krieger 

What I Shared on Orphan Sunday (or...what? I thought she quit her blog.)

We were asked to speak at church on Orphan Sunday. This is what I said...

We would like to thank you for the opportunity to share just a little bit of our adoption journey. This has become much more than an interest to us, it is a passion. But at the same time, we know that adoption is just one way to care for orphans. There are so many more. Thank you for letting us share a little bit of our experience thus far.

We began the process to adopt in the spring of 2011, believing that God was asking us to bring a child who needed a home, into ours. Looking back on the months of doing and redoing paperwork, months of waiting on a list, redoing paperwork as it expired, it seems like the adoption process is somehow designed to break you down or drive you crazy or both. I really believe there is an element of spiritual warfare involved. After all, God in his infinite wisdom puts us all into families, and our Enemy loves it when those families break apart or parents are not able to keep their children. He loves it when people are lonely, isolated, and feeling forgotten and unloved.

Right when we started the process to adopt, we found out that the number of Ethiopian adoptions being processed was slowing down to a trickle. I used to grieve for the time we seemed to have lost and the fact that we didn't start sooner. But when we got our phone call on July 2 of this year, it became clear why we had waited, when we found out who we had been waiting for. On October 10 we started our journey to Ethiopia to finally meet this kid and on Saturday, October 12 we did just that. This is A.(nope, still can't post his name) Douglas Krieger. (Insert pics that I can't share either. One day soon.) He will be keeping his Ethiopian first name. He will be 5 in January. He loves bubbles, he seems to like us but he may like our phones a little more, he sings a really good rendition of "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" despite not knowing any English, he is very intense one minute and very silly the next, he has great soccer foot skills, he has a great head of hair that I could not stop touching, he is crazy busy and usually does not stop moving long enough to get a good picture of him. I don't think there has been a day since we met him that I have not worried about whether or not I will be able to keep up with him. He is wonderful.

And the most amazing thing is how we both loved him instantly. Only God does that. Only God gives you an intense love for a stranger that compels you to go to the ends of the earth to pursue him. We played with and fell in love with all of the kids there that week, but our true love was for A. He deserves a family. Every orphan does. On October 16 we went to court and after answering a few questions from the judge we got to hear her say that he was ours.

I used to believe that God had a child hand-picked for us. One who he always intended to be in our family. I don't think I believe this anymore. Of course God in his omniscience knows what will happen, but I think God's Plan A for any child is always for them to grow up in their birth family. And when I think too long about A and his mother being separated, it threatens to undo me. Of course I am thrilled and honored to be his mother but in no way do I ever think that this was God's intention from the beginning and I hurt for them both. And we know that adoption is usually not picture perfect. There are struggles and there are even horror stories. We've heard them...please don't tell us any more. However, I think that there can be great redemption in adoption and this is our hope: that God will redeem A's hurt. In no way are we A's saviors by adopting him but there is a beautiful picture or parallel within adoption of what Christ did for us at Calvary. He loved us, he died for us, he pursues us.

Our next step is to be given a date to be able to travel back to Ethiopia to obtain his visa to be able to come back with us. This is entirely under the jurisdiction and discretion of the US Embassy. In the eyes of the Ethiopian court, he is ours but the US Embassy must do their own independent investigation into his orphan status. This is done to hopefully prevent and identify corruption in adoption. We are hoping our case is cleared soon, but it could take a while. Please pray with us that things would go smoothly and we would be able to bring A home before Christmas.

And P.S., we found out that we were submitted to the embassy this week...baby steps, but this is good. :)

Waiting Well

One of my children told me that if I did not update this blog, people would get bored with it and stop reading it.

Truth is, there's not much to tell about the adoption. Our January number is 100...our December number was 101. Ugh. As it stands right now, I will probably be able to title quite a few posts in this same way. I had a quarterly phone call with our case manager the other day and was able to ask her about the slow movement of things. She said that it is not necessarily one thing or another, but things that have built on one another. The U.S. Embassy must require documentation about children that proves they are adoptable. Ethiopian adoptions have taken a hard hit because of suspected corruption and all of this becomes so much harder because of adoptions that have been pushed through the system without the proper documentation. I certainly understand. We are eager to meet this child and bring him home but it must be done the right way. I do not want to take someone else's child if there is a possibility they could take care of him there in Ethiopia. This is very important to us and not to be minimized. But the problem with this is that we are talking about a third world country, for whom obtaining this information and paperwork is difficult.

It is not easy knowing that our son is over there and could already be orphaned. He is on our hearts and minds every day and we want him to have a family. I am impatient and want this to go faster. But there is absolutely nothing we can do to make it go faster and life goes by quickly whether we want it to or not, so we will stay busy and pray for him. So feel free to ask us about it. You may get a weary look as we ponder all things concerning patience, but we love to talk about this precious time in our lives. My hope is that we will wait well and not forget why we are doing this. Why ARE we doing this? It certainly isn't cost-efficient, it involves opening ourselves up to MUCH scrutiny, filling out endless paperwork and visiting our notary more times than I'm sure she'd like. Why do we do this for ONE child?? To quote a song that could be described as just a "feel good" adoption song, "Well the truth is, we are all the orphans, but Love has left the 99 just to find one.". That line catches in my throat every time I sing along...and is our "why".

His Story

(I wrote this back in April with a full heart and hopes that one day I can show this little boy what GOD did so that we could be his family. But it's waaaaay too long for a blog post. I would understand if you didn't want to read it. But if you've got the time…)

We are adopting. WE are. The mere fact that we are jumping in is amazing. We had discussed it many times, never quite agreeing on it. It was a passion of MINE. We talked to people, talked to each other and still couldn't agree. One Saturday, when we shouldn't have even been discussing adoption because one of us was seated deep in the clutches of jet-lag, we had "words". It was clear to me that this was just never going to happen and I had a deep sense that I was to blame, for pushing this passion on my husband. God was whispering to me that I needed to LET. IT. GO. He seemed to say that if the shoe were on the other foot or if HE were pushing ME to do something that I didn't want to do, I would resent him for it. Oh yeah. I knew I would. No question. So I dropped it. It hurt and I was so sad, but I did it. In fact, a whole week and three days went by (but who's counting?) without the topic of adoption being discussed by us. Finally, one night as a winter storm was brewing and school had already been cancelled for the next day, we got into bed late and I just wanted to read. It's hard work being sad and I wanted to lose myself in my book. But HE wanted to talk. He asked, "Where are we on this adoption thing?" (WHAT??) I looked up from my book and said, "We aren't anywhere on the adoption thing…God told me to drop it." I looked back down at my book. He went on to ask me what I would say if he said he wanted to adopt. I replied that I would want him to be VERY sure, because I didn't want him to be doing this just for me and regret it later. He assured me that he'd had time to think and pray and he did, in fact, want to adopt. Oh, how I love that man.

Picking an adoption agency and country from which to adopt took some time. First of all, there are SO many choices and SO many criteria to meet. Do we have too many kids in our house already? Are we too old? (Please indulge me in a story.) One day shortly after Christmas, Doug was running errands with our 2 middle children, daughters Lily and Isabel. He asked them what they thought of us adopting. Isabel said, "Well, you wouldn't adopt a baby, right? No offense Dad, you guys are a little old for that." Lately, whenever Isabel begins a sentence with "no offense" I want to hide under something heavy, but no, Isabel, as a matter of fact, we were thinking of a preschool age boy. However, women my age (40!!!) are having babies every day! Were it not for nighttime feedings and diapers, her comment would have made me want to adopt a baby out of spite! Anyway, I kept coming back to a website for All God's Children International and I can't explain it, but it just seemed so right. From their website I watched Matthew West's music video "One Less" and just wept. We had thought about Africa and as it turned out, they had an Ethiopian program. It was a very natural decision to go with AGCI and then to go with Ethiopia as our country of choice. Ethiopia, by the way, is a country about the size of California and Texas combined, with about 5 million orphans! We filled out the application, called in to pay the application fee and we were on our way.

Our next step was to get the Orientation Packet in the mail, read all 734 forms (SLIGHT exaggeration) and get ready for our Orientation phone call. We were ready when our Inquiry Coordinator called on April 7, we asked lots of very intelligent questions, and we jotted down notes. We wrote down the hefty sum of money that would be required to be paid when we sent in all of our contracts and agreements. We were told that our next step would be to receive the home study binder, have a phone call with our case manager and start the home study process. We were pretty sure that coming up with the money for this adoption was doable over the long run, but coming up with the $8790 needed upfront to be able to move forward with the next steps was another thing. We had recently paid off a vehicle and thought that we could refinance that vehicle, as the value of it was about the same amount of money we needed. We went to get the title and planned to drop it off at the bank in the next couple of weeks. Doug had already spoken with the bank about this and it was just a matter of signing the papers.

One thing that I had not lacked in this whole adventure thus far was confidence that this was what the Lord was asking us to do. I just knew it was. But I began to wonder what I would do with another child, a preschooler, and what this would do to the already wonderful structure of our family. We have 4 great kids, who for the most part are well-behaved as well as a joy to their mom and dad. They all have their moments, but things run pretty smoothly around here. But God knows what we need and when we need it, because confirmation in the form of a check from my parents, who knew nothing of any of this, was about to overwhelm us. My parents asked us to lunch on Sunday, April 10, saying they had something to talk to us about, but that it was nothing heavy. After finishing our meal at a restaurant in our town, they handed us a check for $5000…just because…to use for whatever we needed. And they reassured us that no, they were not dying. As I mentioned before, we had not yet shared with my parents that we were beginning the process to adopt. They had no way of knowing how much this would help us get started and how perfect the timing was. We were in awe of our mighty God working backstage. It made me wonder, "Does God owe us confirmation when we follow Him in obedience?" I don't think so. But God in His grace confirmed our decision in an undeniable way that day.

As I look at a beautiful picture of our family, that will hopefully soon be outdated, I wonder how we got to this point. I didn't really ever think that anyone was missing at the time the photo was taken. I love all of the people surrounding me with a "Be still, my beating heart" kind of love and before this point in our lives, I did not long for someone else to join us. I always wanted 4 children and God graciously gave them to us. They are ours for a moment and His forever. But what God has planted in us, we must be obedient to grow. His heart is for the orphan and He sets the lonely in families. There is no careless delusion in us that we are changing the world with this adoption. But this is something that we can do. God has provided the means to care for another child and the capacity to love another child. We are far from perfect parents, but with the help of God and by His grace, we will do this. Realistically, there will be issues and problems along the way. There will be cultural barriers to cross and overwhelming floods of grief and loss that this child will need help wading through. We know there are no guarantees in any of this and that life is messy and that faith will surely take on a new meaning for our family. And we know that 4+1=5 and that's a lot of kids. But thinking about how Christ died for us on the cross, and adopted us into his "forever family" if we will only believe in salvation through Him, makes my heart tremble and adds a new dimension to this unfolding story of ours.

Or maybe...it's really His story.

 

 

Reluctant Blogger

I have NO idea what I am doing...really.  In fact, my 12 year old designed this blog, figured out how to post widgets (whatever those are), and found a really fun little website with lots of cool backgrounds.  (How much do you think I should pay her??)  I was just going to use the generic ones with the stacked books on the side, or the boring one called "Watermark".

I've been fighting starting this blog for a while because, being a private person, I'm not even sure I want you to read it.  I know there is no shortage of blogs out there.  Mine will not stand out or WOW (!!!) anyone. But God has been nudging me to record our present journey of adoption.  At this point we have our dossier completed and have been on our agency's waitlist for a month, for a little boy from Ethiopia between the ages of 3 and 5.  This boy is already in our hearts and God is growing a love for him in each of us.

My four birth children are most deprived.  They don't  have baby books, forGET home videos, and I SHUDDER at the thought of scrapbooking.  We do have pictures...in boxes...somewhere.  Please don't call Children's Services.  Someday I hope to pull it all together for them, but .see, with this child...with THIS child, I want to do things a little bit differently.  Not because he will be loved any more than the rest.  But because there will be pieces that I can't fill in for him.  Pieces that will no doubt grieve us both.  But do you know what  I can tell him?  Even now, possibly many months before meeting him?  I can tell him how God changed hearts. I can tell him how God prepared hearts. I can tell him how God in his grace confirmed our decision to adopt in the first place.  I can tell him how (just like when I was pregnant), I sit here and wait with anticipation (with a few extra pounds) for the day we will meet and I already love, love, love him.  Oh yes, that is my purpose with all of this.

But honestly, there's too much going on around here for it JUST to be about adoption.  So come along...if you want. ;)  I will try and figure out how to post some things that I typed up several months ago before I committed to the whole BLOG thing, that will give him (and you!) an idea of what was going on around here when we first began the process (and it may help to catch my readers up to speed!).  MY readers...cracks me up I'm even doing this...