Anna's Story

A Wild Roller Coaster Ride
We, Scott and LuAnn, were married on April 4, 1998. Knowing that we wanted a big family by today’s standards, we immediately tried to have a baby. However, infertility issues prevented us from having a biological child. We were blessed in being able to discover our fertility issues in 1999 and we quickly moved to adoption to build our family.

We had discussed adoption before our marriage and we both felt that this was the path God wanted us to take to build our family. We completed our homestudy and our “Dear Birth Parent” letter in the fall of 1999.

After only being in the “book” for just over two months, we received our first call. We were so excited! She was a beautiful 15 year old birthmother whose parents strongly supported her in the adoption process. We fell in love with the birthmother and her family and prayed that this would be our child through adoption. It was down to us and one other couple. However, God had different plans and the other couple was chosen to adopt this child.

We initially thought that since we got one call so quickly, we would get another one very soon. However after waiting another six months and not receiving any calls from birth parents, we decided to be more proactive in finding birthparents. We created our first adoption web site and distributed "hope to adopt" letters and adoption cards to our friends and family. We had numerous calls and emails from birthmothers from our adoption web site but still no baby. In March of 2001, we became aware of a potential birthmother situation through someone at our church. She was expecting twins - a boy and a girl! Both of us have twins in our family and we were really excited. Two babies would even be better than one baby!!!

On April 12, our social worker called us and said “we have a situation”. Since I had heard this several times before, I didn’t get too excited, plus we were still waiting to hear more about the twins. She had a young birthmother, Elizabeth, that was due any time in the next month. Would we be interested? Of course we were but I also explained the twin situation. Our social worker told us we would be able to do both adoptions if the birthmothers agreed. We talked several times that day before I realized that this birthmother had actually picked us and not just narrowed it down to several couples. Now I was excited!!! Would this baby be the answer to our adoption dream?

Sunday was Easter and we were praying that this adoption would go through. We didn’t have an exact due date for the baby but the birthmother was going to the Dr. on Wednesday and we would get more information about the birthmother and the baby after that. We decided to only tell my younger sister and her husband about this baby on Easter.

We had both previously scheduled three days off after Easter to get some yard work done. At 9:00 am on Monday morning our social worker called us to and said “Elizabeth had a baby girl at 3:15 am." We have a baby! I quickly woke up my night-owl of a husband to tell him we had a baby girl. I think he thought he was dreaming. By noon we were at the hospital and we were able to hold and feed our precious little baby girl. She was absolutely beautiful! Two days later we took our baby Anna home.

Elizabeth, Anna's birthmother, initially did not want contact with us or the baby but after a week decided she wanted to meet us. We were scared: what if she didn’t like us, what if she decided she wanted to parent this beautiful little girl, etc.? However, we were excited to meet her and take pictures so that we could share information with Anna about her birthmother and family. Although we were very nervous, we were thrilled to have this visit. We met not only Anna’s birthmother but her two half sisters as well. We took pictures of everybody and are now able to tell Anna how special her birthmother is. We initially maintained contact through letters and pictures. However, we have lost contact with Elizabeth at this time. We hope some day that we will reconnect and we will welcome her and her family back into our lives.

We later found out that the birthmother expecting twins decided to parent. We wish her the best.

Our adoption journey did not end here. We welcome you to contine on and read Emma's Adoption Story.