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Last Updated: Feb 16th, 2008 - 17:39:39 |
In 1999, Meghan came to them from China. The next year, Robyn, also from China. Then Colin from Bolivia, Stephen from China, Carlin from Romania, Madlin from Haiti, Caelyn from China, then Kathryn, Braeden, Ian and Ethan from Guatemala. In the spring, the Rosenows will go to Guatemala one more time to pick up Shannen, a 17-month-old girl with a severe cleft lip and palate.
Madlin, they say, wins the award for the scariest adoption. She's the one that got Kathy arrested at the Dayton airport.
"We only had 24 hours notice to fly to Miami to get her," Kathy said, and so she grabbed a suitcase from a closet and she and the oldest daughter Kristen, who was on spring break from college, rushed to Dayton to catch a plane.
But as they were going through security, a Transportation Security Administration officer was going through the luggage and pulled out what Kathy thought was a Chinese fan from a side pocket. It was a hand-painted butterfly knife that Kristen had purchased during a recent trip to Florida and had forgotten to unpack.
Kathy ended up in the Montgomery County Jail for the night, but the next morning, a pair of detectives came in and told her that not only would the charges be dropped, but that the entire arrest would be expunged from the record.
The biggest adventure, they say, was going to Bolivia to pick up Colin.
"Bolivia requires that both parents be in country for the whole process, which takes about five weeks," Scott said. "We got home from China four days earlier with Robyn, and because of her condition we didn't think it would be right to separate her from the family right away, so we took the whole family to Bolivia."
Because the Rosenows are dealing with special-needs children, however, not all of the adoptions work out as planned.
In 2006, Scott and Kathy were trying to adopt a 7-month-old girl from Guatemala that they had named Lauren Amelia.
"She was born with six different heart defects, and we were racing the clock to get her out of Guatemala before she died," Kathy said. "Her adoption moved very quickly, but then stalled at the last step.
She needed to have an operation before they could bring her home, so Scott and Kathy went there to see her through it.
"She came through initially but took a serious turn for the worse later that night and died the next day," Kathy said. Lauren was buried inside a wall located in what is referred to as "Baby Alley" in a cemetery in Guatemala City — a wall that has babies' burial vaults stacked six high.
"Those who were helping us made sure that her stone marked her grave as being our daughter, even though her adoption was never completed," Kathy said. "To us, this was an essential proclamation to the world that this discarded child had a family of her own — a family who loved and wanted her."
But with a country full of children in need, the Rosenows decided to take advantage of the paperwork in process and transfer it to another child in Lauren's memory.
"That day a newborn baby girl with cleft lip and palate suddenly became available and wasn't doing well at all because she couldn't suck her bottles," Kathy said.
After a long and complicated process, the adoption was finalized last Thursday, the same day the entire Rosenow family filed into Butler County Probate Judge Randy Rogers' courtroom to finalize the adoptions of Ian and Ethan. Scott and Kathy will travel to Guatemala in the spring to bring her home, where she will have to have surgery right away to begin repairing her clefts.
Crowded house
With all these children, the Rosenows have reached maximum capacity on their five-bedroom home in Fairfield Twp. A group of friends have banded together to build them a new home.
"We're first going to raise the money to buy the land then have an architect create a design," said Frank Riley, a Cincinnati man whose wife, Suzanne, has been working with the Shepherd's Crook Ministries since it began. "Our goal is to raise funds for a 9,200-square-foot home, and we are now in the early stages of setting up a trust fund and a tax-deferred account to do that."
"We know we can't adopt forever, but we don't know where that point is," Scott Rosenow said. "We're at the limit in this house, but that's not really an issue."
"Our motto is that as long as you're potty training someone, you'll never get old," Kathy said.
Christmas at the Rosenows
Even before they started adopting, the Rosenows began creating Christmas traditions — so many of them, in fact, that it's hard to keep them all straight.
"I started to put a movie on the other day," Kathy said, "and they all stopped me — 'No! We watch that when we decorate the tree.' "
Some of the traditions had to be adjusted as the family grew. It would be too expensive and impractical, for instance, for each child to buy a gift for every sibling, so they started a Secret Sibling program.
"On Thanksgiving after dinner is over, we push the dishes aside and put everyone's name in a basket, then pass it around," Kathy said. "Then we'd spend the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas thinking about what the sibling might want before we'd go shopping."
"The point of the Secret Sibling is we want them to spend some time thinking about what the siblings would want, to think about something other than me-me-me," Scott said.
Because of the great expense involved in keeping a large family, especially a family that saw 11 surgeries in a 12-month period, the Rosenows depend on special gifts from families and friends to have a Christmas. Kathy's parents and Scott's mother (his father has passed away), for instance, provide an annual gift that pays for the Secret Sibling gifts.
"We used to have a Christmas Club account like everyone else," Kathy said, "but it got to where it took every penny for us to survive."
In 2005, the first year that Scott had left his career as a mechanical engineer to operate the Shepherd's Crook Ministries full-time, the family faced the possibility of a very small Christmas.
"We called the older children aside to talk about what Christmas was really about," Kathy said. "We told them that they might have to do without anything so that we could do something for the younger children, and they were OK with that."
"We said that we can't do both the dinner and the Secret Sibling," Kathy said. "The kids voted that we should go out and have that family time together even if we didn't have any gifts. It made us think about families that go without Christmas every year."
Fortunately, however, an anonymous donor, a friend of a friend, came forward to save the Secret Sibling.
"They'll give us money," Kathy said, "and then thank us for letting them be a part of our children's lives."
Find this article at:
http://www.journal-news.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2007/12/24/hjn122507rosenowinside.html
© Copyright 2008 by AdoptionDesk.com
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