We drove for close to two hours to a place in Colorado I have never been. The dust from the road swirled around our car as we bounced along the backroads of Peyton, near Colorado Springs.

“Where are we going?”, I asked as I looked around at the wide open spaces between the houses and horse stables.

“To a home large enough I guess,” Hubby replied.

Hubby worked with a friend in Thailand many years back and has kept in touch through Facebook. A few years ago, Hubby saw a post from his friend that his friend was trying to raise support to adopt a girl from a very horrible situation in Texas. We donated.

Today, we are going to meet this girl and the family. As I learned more about this family, though, my intrigue only grew. This family has six of their own birth children and adopted five. Incredible!

As we pulled up, I grew nervous, not sure how to talk about adoption without seeming like it was a four-letter word or as though the adopted children are black-sheep to the family. I’m so awkward.

We walked in and there were children all over the main part of the house! The older four were in the kitchen making treats while the younger four (including the girl we unofficially met through the Facebook story) were playing Wii in the family room.

The parents welcomed us warmly and invited us to sit and talk as we wanted to learn more about their adoption experiences.

I was appalled to learn the number of young people who are stuck in the foster system in the United States. Wishing I would have written down the statistics I learned throughout the day, here’s what I recall:

• Texas has a significantly high number of children in the foster system*, 600,000!
• Colorado has close to 100,000 children in the foster system*
• If one family in every church across the nation adopted one child, there would not be an issue with children needing to be adopted from the fostering in the US.

*Foster system: the first choice is for children to remain/return to the birth mother/father. Fewer children are foster-to-adopt with a high number of sibling-sets needing families.

Hubby and I are just at the beginning of our adoption research and I have not been as open to the idea of fostering to adopt because of the stories I’ve heard and yet, I left today thinking a little more of the possibility.

We are wanting to adopt a baby for our first adoption and then in a few years would like to adopt a sibling group of 2 or 3. If we could wave a magic wand, I believe we would want to live in a larger house to be able to adopt a couple of sibling groups and be able to give the kids a home, a family, a future…

With how much it costs to adopt internationally and how much of a need there is domestically, I am much more open learning about various domestic adoption agencies and researching the agencies that have the greatest need for adopting families.