Our Story
Carmi and I met on April 1, 1986.
A local roller skating rink was having a Christian skate night. I went with two female friends from church and Carmi was there with a female friend and her friend’s 10-year-old brother. As soon as my two friends and I walked in the door, Carmi told her friend that she thought I was cute.
The quiet, unassuming little brother overheard her remark and asked, “Do you want me to tell him you want to skate with him?”
“No!” Carmi replied and then she immediately turned to her friend and asked, “He won’t do that, will he?”.
She assured Carmi that he would not.
When she turned back around, the kid had bolted straight for me and exclaimed, “That girl wants to date you!” as he pointed in Carmi’s general direction.
There was quite a crowd of people standing around so the first person I see - and I’m assuming this is the girl he’s referring to - is a rather l-a-r-g-e female. “Oh, Lord” was my first thought. My second thought was to run so that’s exactly what I did. I caught up with my two friends and told them they had to hide me.
From behind them, I surveyed the crowd of people again and saw this young boy standing and talking with Carmi and his sister. Somehow I suddenly realized that it was Carmi he was talking about. “Holy cow!”, I remember mumbling. After putting my eyes back in their sockets, I walked quickly over and asked her if she would like to skate. She said “Yes” and the rest is history.
We became engaged on July 4, 1986 and were married on November 15, 1986. We were both 23 years old and had no desire to rush into parenthood. Oh, we wanted children but our ‘plan’ was to wait five years which would give us time to settle into a new life together. Almost without realizing it, those five years quickly turned into ten. Then a short time later - sometime in 1997 - there was a mutual epiphany. We realized that our biological clocks were ticking and if we wanted children, we should start right away. So we tried. For three years we tried and after agonizing over our third straight miscarriage, I finally said “enough is enough”. Having a ‘biological’ child was not so important to us that we wanted to risk any further physical or emotional pain.
Soon our thoughts turned to adoption but domestic adoption was never really a consideration. The thought of investing money and love into a child only to have the birth mother change her mind at the last minute was another risk we were not willing to take. So international adoption would be our choice and specifically an adoption from China.
We researched and attended a couple of adoption seminars by different agencies in the summer of 2000. Friends of ours were doing the same thing at the same time and we frequently traded thoughts, ideas and information. For our 14th anniversary in November of 2000, we decided to take a trip to Hendersonville in the North Carolina mountains and while there, attend a seminar sponsored by Christian World Adoption. Our friends also went the same weekend. Tomilee Harding, CWA’s Executive Director, led the seminar this particular day and we just fell in love with her, her passion and the agency’s vision - “We Believe That God is in Control of our Agency and Your Adoption”. Both couples knew that this was the agency we wanted to use. As soon as we returned home from the mountains, Carmi wrote a check and mailed our application.
Over the next several months, beginning on January 1, 2001, we worked to get all of our information together. Our documents were sent to China on July 20, 2001 and were logged in to China’s system on July 23, 2001. All we could do now was wait. We waited for 14 long months which must have been a record for referrals. On October 2, 2002 we received ‘the call’ from Virginia Zanger at CWA. Carmi was sitting in a Chick-Fil-A when her cell phone rang. Our little one was in Shaoyang, SWI in Shaoyang, Hunan, China and her name was Shao Fu Zhou. Her birth date was estimated to be February 20, 2002 and the day she was found abandoned was March 6, 2002. We like to think that maybe her birth parents waited until the weather was better or maybe they tried to think of a way to be able to keep her. We’ll probably never know.
Now things began to get interesting. Our I-171H, which is the form allowing US citizens to bring an orphan child into the US, was going to expire on November 9, 2002. Normally the wait for travel approval is 6 - 8 weeks. We would not beat the expiration date if we waited. So our agency began to bend over backwards and assist the travel agency and China in doing so as well. We were on our way to China on October 27, 2002 and returned home on November 9 with our new daughter.
On September 16 of 2005, Carmi and I decided to begin the paperwork to bring home a little sister for Eliana. Our dossier was mailed to China on June 13, 2006 and logged into their system on June 20.
