The beginning

     I was only three years of age when I was welcomed home by my mother and father. I was adopted from Costa Rica over 22 years ago. I came home with my three sisters. My mother and father adopted four children from Costa Rica. We were considered hard to place because of being a sibling group. 
     It was hard to adopt from Costa Rica because agencies didn't really work with Costa Rica, so with the help of Bethany Christian Services my parents were able to figure out a way to adopt. My parents adoption will also influence more children. The love and blessings they have given will continue.
      It has been 22 years since my adoption and now my wife and I have decided to adopt from Costa Rica. We would like to offer a child a family that will love them more than words can describe. Our two children Mark and Kyra are very excited to have a brother or sister. Mark is four years of age and Kyra is three years of age. They talk about their brother or sister daily. Most days they ask when we will be getting on the big air plane to pick up their brother or sister.
     While we were dating we both spoke of adopting a child it was on both of our hearts. Within our first three years of marriage we were blessed with two wonderful children. On our fourth year of marriage we decided to start the process of adoption. We didn't realize that Costa Rica still didn't have many agencies working with them. We thought that we would be able to use Bethany Christian Services. We sent our pre-application to Bethany and soon realized that they didn't work with Costa Rica and we began to look at other places to adopt from. We received our packet from Bethany and we were shocked to see that we couldn't adopt at all because we weren't old enough and we weren't married long enough. The minimum age seemed to be 25 years of age and 5 years of marriage. We decided to wait a year until I was 25 years of age and Laura was 24 years of age. At that point we were married for Five years.
     We submited our pre-application again and decided that we might look to adopt from Haiti or Ethiopia. We were told very quickly that Haiti would not let us adopt because we had to be 35 years of age and married for 10 years. At that point we thought we would adopt from Ethiopia. We discussed as a family where to adopt from and our hearts were still with Costa Rica, but that was a problem because we still needed to find an agency that worked with Costa Rica.