There is so much I would love to say about adoption but when I sit down to type, I really never know where to start.  Jessie and I always talked about being people who inspired other families to adopt but had a hard time getting people to move off the line and get started.   Our third child Ruth is adopted through the Foster Care Adoption program in Sacramento and we learned so much through the process about orphans and the terrible future they face.   I wish I could remember the exact statstics about how many orphans are available in America but its overwhelming.  There are way to many kids looking for families and hardly any families willing to open their homes.  Before we were placed with Ruth our adoption agency would have us come every week to their office and they would place several large binders on our laps where we would flip through page after page of information sheets on children who needed families.  We would sit there in tears as we looked at the children and though of how we wanted to adopt all of them.   Being here in this country has been hard in nearly the same way, we see hundreds of children every day who do not have parents and are living on the street, we know that international adoption is not the answer for every child but its so good when we see one of these children go into a family that will love them.   Yesterday we went to the pool at the Hilton hotel (our mini vacation day) and there were several families there who were here picking up their newly adopted children, it always makes me happy to see these families, you know that they are going through one of the most major adjustments of their lives but that they are also there for all the right reasons, they are opening up their lives to love a child.   We are bad and we like to people watch while we are there and you can see that the families are trying desperatley to figure out their new child, many of the children are around a year old and old enough to know that they are in a different place than they are used to, you can see the parents trying to read the baby and figure out what these new faces and emotions are all about.   I want to just go up to them and tell them that everything is going to be ok.   I heard a great quote the other day that I believe is true “I have four children, two of them adopted but I can never remember which two”   That is exactly what it is like for us.

We are very excited that we are moving forward to get these childred adopted but more than that we are happy to be able to encourage more families to adopt children.   At this point we have more familes than the 9 kids we have in the orphanage today but it makes my heart happy to hear that every one of those families has committed to adopt a child from here even if these chilren already have homes.     That is true commitment, because the fact of the matter is the world has way to many orphans (143 million) and not nearly enough families to take them in.

Levi