Thanks, Jane!

I contacted Gladney during our last adoption search, but I wasn't able to get them to respond to my emails for more information. ??? I guess they weren't the direction we were supposed to go.

Yes, we were supposed to be one of the three families presented at Eliza's placement hearing. I hope you know I would never hold anything against your family, because you were the family the Lord had chosen for Eliza all along, not us. Yes, it was a very hard pill to swallow at the time, because we were excluded from the placement meeting due to no fault of our own....the injustice of what happened made me very angry with Eliza's worker, because it was her screw-up.

But after the dust settled and I calmed down enough to hear the Lord, I knew He was saying she wasn't meant to join our family. Before the placement meeting Paul and I had prayed that if we weren't supposed to adopt her, that He would block the placement, and sure enough, He answered our prayers. The screw-up over the phone #'s shouldn't have happened, but it did, so we knew He had intervened.

It was one year and four days later when we got the email from Luke's birth parents, asking if we were still interested in adopting him. At that moment I instantly understood the Lord's plan for our family, and why He hadn't allowed us to be chosen for Eliza or several others along the way....because if we had, we never would have been blessed with our sweet, precious Luke. The Lord knew best, and I can honestly say all the heartache was worth it.

So if you don't mind me asking, what kind of heartache is the SSAdm giving you? Surely Eliza already had a SS# and SSI after being in foster-care? Jaden already had both when we adopted him, although the agency was still his official "payee"....unfortunately, the agency illegally kept his SSI checks for 5 months until his cradle care bill was paid, even though his cradle care bill was never mentioned at all until he'd been in our home for over 6 weeks. We signed a contract with the agency, and no where on it was back cradle care bills mentioned. I went round and round with the agency, I contacted the SSAdm in CO and KS, but we never saw a dime of the disputed money (almost $2,000), even though the SSAdm agreed with us that it was illegal for the agency to keep Jaden's SSI checks after placement.

We also had headaches with Jaden's SS#...the first year we claimed him on our taxes, the IRS disallowed him as a dependent because someone else had already claimed him on their taxes. Gee, could it have possibly been his former foster parents? Or maybe his first adoptive family, or even his birth family? All three of them knew his SS#, so any one of them could have been the guilty party. We'll never know who it was, but I immediately insisted that the SSAdm issue him a new SS#. They reluctantly gave him a new one, and they were supposed to inactivate his old #, but they didn't. So Jaden had two active SS#'s until last fall when I was trying to get them to issue Luke a SS#. I finally got them to close the first #, but they weren't happy about it.

Anyway, hope you get your problems with the SSAdm worked out....I'm hoping we'll hear something soon on Luke's SS#, so we can finally get the ball rolling on his finalization.

Blessings,
Patrice