Couple Puts Joy Above Bureaucracy Complicated State Process Doesn’t Deter Adoption Of Five

The joys of helping children far outweigh the difficulties for a Kitsap County couple who have adopted five youngsters.

Bob and Lisa - they asked that their last names not be used - talk of the satisfaction of seeing special-needs youngsters transformed by love and a sense of family.

All five of the youngsters had been through the state foster-care system at least four times. Three of them are known to have been abused by their biological parents.

Social-service officials say there are plenty of caring couples ready to take in troubled kids but discouraged by the cumbersome bureaucracy. Adoption can take up to four years.

But a $5.1 million private and federal grant seeks to streamline the state process, partly by stepping up recruitment. Administrators of the so-called Families for Kids Initiative, an effort of the Children’s Home Society and the state Department of Social and Health Services, say they want to speed up permanent placement of foster children whose parents have no legal claim to them. Their goal is a one-year process.

Statewide, the program has targeted about 400 special-needs children for placement.

“As adoptive parents, we have had to deal more with the lack of trust these kids have from bouncing numerous times through the system then from their special needs,” says Lisa, a former VISTA volunteer.

“We did not adopt to have perfect kids,” she said. “People say they don’t want damaged kids, but we didn’t feel that way. We adopted because we had a heart for it and had the love to give.”

She and Bob, an architect, have been married 15 years. Their resources go into their family, settled on a rural 5-acre lot with goats, sheep and chickens. Besides the adopted five, they have two biological children.

“You have to pull together. We’re a team, or we’re nothing,” says Bob.

The seven youngsters, who range in age from 3 to 14, help one another and sometimes their life looks idyllic.

But there are problems.

One of the girls was so badly abused by her father that she wouldn’t permit Bob to hug her for more than a year.

At first, Lisa recalled, the child would curl up in a fetal position on the floor of her bedroom, yelling, “Somebody! Somebody!”

When they adopted their first child, Mike, now 13, they knew there was a reason he had been shifted among four foster homes, but didn’t know what it was.

At 10, he was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, caused by his mother’s drinking during pregnancy. That explained his erratic behavior.