by Carla Raley

Created on: July 08, 2009   Last Updated: July 09, 2009

My husband and I thought our family was pretty well finished. We were 50 and 54, and babies had long quit coming the natural way. I felt content with my seven biological children. My first two daughters grew up, married, and gave me nine grandchildren, some of them the ages of my younger children. They spent a lot of time with me, and my house stayed full.

Then, my oldest daughter Rachael and her husband decided to become foster parents. Her foster children intrigued me, we had done foster care twenty years before, and taken care of two prison babies in the meantime; I thought about getting a license again, but kept putting it off until she got two children, ages 6 and 3, that I just fell in love with. As a year went by, and termination of parental rights were scheduled for these two, my husband and I did indeed begin the process of getting a foster/adopt license to try and adopt these two children. However, it was soon discovered that their mother was pregnant again, and three weeks after the discovery, she gave birth to a premature baby boy. Being in our 50's, I couldn't imagine that the state would also let us adopt a newborn, but we continued to express our interest in these children, and let the state know we would take all three of them.

The pregnancy gave the mother six more months to try and work the plan the state laid out for her, and it began to seem like she would get her children back. However, at the very last minute, her boyfriend learned he was not the baby's father, and the mother ended up relinquishing the baby and taking the older two children home with her. The baby's attorney wanted to know, did we want to adopt the baby without the older two?

I remember that day I was asked that question. The baby was at my house, and I took him out on the porch and rocked. I looked at this child I had grown to love so much, and thought, we never would have even thought of adopting a newborn! We were so old! But I heard the Lord say to me This was my plan all along. It was the baby I wanted you to have! I cried as I rocked him.

A year later, when the baby was 18 months old, he became our new son, and we named him Luke.

Since we had our foster care license, we continued to foster. A week after Luke's adoption was final, in the middle of the night CPS called us, and soon knocked on our door with a two and a half year old girl, Angel-Leah. She was so beautiful and so verbal. We fell in love with her, all while trying to help her family

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