Carmi and I met on April 1, 1986.

A local roller skating rink was having a Christian skate night. I went with two female friends from church and Carmi was there with a female friend and her friend’s 10-year-old brother. As soon as my two friends and I walked in the door, Carmi told her friend that she thought I was cute.

The quiet, unassuming little brother overheard her remark and asked, “Do you want me to tell him you want to skate with him?”

“No!” Carmi replied and then she immediately turned to her friend and asked, “He won’t do that, will he?”.

She assured Carmi that he would not.

When she turned back around, the kid had bolted straight for me and exclaimed, “That girl wants to date you!” as he pointed in Carmi’s general direction.

There was quite a crowd of people standing around so the first person I see - and I’m assuming this is the girl he’s referring to - is a rather l-a-r-g-e female. “Oh, Lord” was my first thought. My second thought was to run so that’s exactly what I did. I caught up with my two friends and told them they had to hide me.

From behind them, I surveyed the crowd of people again and saw this young boy standing and talking with Carmi and his sister. Somehow I suddenly realized that it was Carmi he was talking about. “Holy cow!”, I remember mumbling. After putting my eyes back in their sockets, I walked quickly over and asked her if she would like to skate. She said “Yes” and the rest is history.

We became engaged on July 4, 1986 and married on November 15, 1986.

We were both 23 years old and had no desire to rush into parenthood. Oh, we wanted children but our ‘plan’ was to wait five years which would give us time to settle into a new life together. Almost without realizing it, those five years quickly turned into ten. Then a short time later - sometime in 1997 - there was a mutual epiphany. We realized that our biological clocks were ticking and if we wanted children, we should start right away. So we tried. For three years we tried and after agonizing over our third straight miscarriage, I finally said “enough is enough”. Having a ‘biological’ child was not so important to us that we wanted to risk any further emotional pain. I certainly didn’t want Carmi to suffer more physical pain.

Soon our thoughts turned to adoption but domestic adoption was never really a consideration. The thought of investing money and love into a child only to have the birth mother change her mind at the last minute was another risk we were not willing to take. So international adoption would be our choice and specifically an adoption from China.