Overflowing with Love
Bill, Karin and Baby Ali
Bill and Karin’s adoption journey was not without its setbacks: they were discouraged from adopting by adoption professionals, they had a disrupted identified adoption, and they even lost their home to a flood. But through it all, Bill and Karin remained determined to become parents.
“If it hadn’t happened the way it did,” Bill says. “We wouldn’t have Ali.”
…
“We decided right away that we wanted to try again [after the disruption], but we just didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go,” Karin says. “I think we would have always wondered if we hadn’t tried.”
A recommendation from an adoption social worker led them to American Adoptions. They started the process in December of 2010 and went active in March. For many couples, the wait for an adoption opportunity is fraught with worry and anxiety. But Bill and Karin had an additional and unanticipated worry: a flood. Their North Dakota town was threatened by rising flood waters. In May, they evacuated their home temporarily. They evacuated again in June; this time, the waters rose almost to the roof, and the couple began plans to rebuild elsewhere.
“Even with everything else, the house and the evacuating and everything else, [the adoption] was kind of on our minds all the time,” Bill says. “We even had a discussion, maybe a week before we got the call that we were matched, of wondering if it was going to happen.”
While family and friends helped them evacuate their home, the couple joked, “Now, we’ll probably get the call about the baby,” Karin says. “One of my aunts was actually packing up all the baby stuff. And she said, let’s pack this really carefully because I just know that tomorrow, we’re going to get the call and you’re going to have to leave.”
Baby Ali
But in the end, all the timing worked out pretty well. “We had pretty much finished cleaning out our house and sanitizing and everything else,” Bill says. “Literally two weeks later, we got the call that we were matched [in September]. We had told the [social] workers about the flood and everything else. We moved into our new home in November, and the social worker here in town was here a week later to look at the house and update everything to be able to get it submitted before the baby was due.”
The new house, built “way up on a hill,” closed quickly, and “it was almost exactly a month later that we were driving to Oregon because Ali was being born, who we thought was Jameson at the time,” says Bill.
