71-year-old adopts five great-grandchildren

KALISPELL, Mont. – Call it extreme parenting.

Seventy-one-year-old Virginia Crawford and her husband, Charlie, 76, have adopted her five great-grandchildren.

“At my age, I’m on my knees to God every day asking, ‘Please give me the energy for another day,’ ” Virginia Crawford said after adopting a boy and four girls, ages 3 to 8, last week in District Court.

“After the hearing, they just hugged us,” she said. “It was a joyous time.”

Crawford paces herself to keep up with Phillip, Saritha, Taressa and the twins, Renee and Jenee.

She has cared for the girls intermittently for several years. Home is a 1963 trailer with an attachment as a family room.

Motherhood began with Crawford’s rearing of three children.

Then she helped her widowed son raise his son and daughter. When the young woman, Crawford’s granddaughter, separated from her first husband, Crawford helped care for her great-granddaughters.

Their mother remarried and bore Phillip. Then child-welfare officials told Crawford the children were neglected.

“They were going to put them in a foster home,” she said. “I said, ‘Don’t take them away. I’m coming back.’ “

The Crawfords, married for 27 years, had moved to Idaho but returned to the northwestern Montana town of Columbia Falls and took foster-parent classes. Crawford said the instruction profoundly affected her understanding of what kids experience in losing a family.

Given her age, she has identified relatives who will take over raising the children if she dies.

But she expects to see the job through.

“I’m perfectly healthy, as far as I know,” she said.

She wants the kids to maintain a relationship with their biological parents, and if the parents’ lives are conducive to visits, then visits will be allowed, she said.

The children’s mother supported the adoptions and was in court when they became official.

Charlie Crawford, who was childless, receives a government pension. Virginia Crawford said her Social Security checks are small, because much of her work has been as a Pentecostal missionary. She does not expect money to be a problem, however.

“I’m conservative, from the old school,” she said. “You don’t buy everything you see.”

Part of Crawford’s philosophy of child rearing is that “a child was not put here to make their own decisions.

“The younger generation thinks children should make their own decisions, but that doesn’t work for Grandma.”