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Love of a child is boundless

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published January 27, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - It was as though an entire village turned out to welcome the two tiny girls, just 5 months old and half a world away from where they were born.

Excited grandparents, aunts, uncles, colleagues and friends surrounded the babies shortly after they arrived at Tampa International Airport.

Ecstatic new mom Jennifer Hall cradled Laney in her arms. She had spent an anxious two weeks waiting for husband Eric Anderson to return from Vietnam with their newly adopted daughter.

"It was so surreal for me to meet my daughter," she said.

The welcome party that late October evening also was for Hall's neighbors, David Kramer and Megan Watson Kramer, who also were returning from Vietnam, with new daughter Sadie.

It was emotional. "There were about 25 people standing in a clump, crying," said Watson Kramer, 37.

"It was just an amazing reception," recalled Anderson, 40, who cared for his new baby during the long journey from Vietnam to Taipei to Los Angeles to Tampa.

Settling in

In the three months since the girls' arrival in the Euclid-St. Paul neighborhood of St. Petersburg, they have been enrolled in the same day care center, costumed as two peas in a pod for Halloween and dressed in red and white for Christmas photographs.

"It's better than we had even hoped it would be," said Watson Kramer, choking up as she tried to describe her emotions. "People keep saying that these girls are so lucky. What is so funny is we feel that we are the lucky ones."

The couples began the adoption process in December 2005. The Kramers had tried to have a baby. Hall had two miscarriages.

The friends handled all the adoption requirements together. "The paperwork was just incredible," Hall said.

The women, directors at the Leadership Development Institute at Eckerd College, have offices next to each other.

Their joy has been shared at the small campus, where Watson Kramer's parents, Kathryn and Sterling Watson, are faculty members. College president Donald R. Eastman III was in the airport welcome party; his wife, Christine, threw a baby shower.

Anderson and the Kramers spent two weeks in Vietnam finalizing the adoptions. They picked up their daughters from an orphanage about two hours from Ho Chi Minh City.

"The orphanage was clean, bright and airy," Watson Kramer said. "The babies looked healthy and happy."

David Kramer, 32, laughed as he recalled how awkward he was the first time he held his daughter.

"When my wife handed Sadie to me, I knew immediately that it was meant to be," he said. "There is no greater feeling than when you hold your child for the first time."

A growing trend

International adoptions have increased for more than a decade, though there was a small drop in 2006 because of a change in China's adoption policies, said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of Adoption Nation.

Pertman, an adoptive father, said costs can be $15,000, $30,000 or higher to adopt an infant.

Nancy Janus, associate professor of human development at Eckerd, and her husband, Brian Berry, are proud parents of three daughters from Colombia. "My husband and I could never have made kids as wonderful as my three girls," Janus said.

Since then, she has helped dozens of prospective parents with international adoptions.

"I would talk with them a lot, that if you adopt a child that is racially and ethnically different than you that you immediately become a very public family," she said. "In effect, people don't think anything of approaching you in a grocery store and asking, is your husband Hispanic, and those types of things."

She talked to prospective parents about race and health issues, about having realistic expectations. It's important, she said, to teach children to be proud of their roots.

Sadie's and Laney's parents are committed to that. They were inspired, in part, to adopt from Vietnam by friend Suzan Harrison, Eckerd's associate dean of faculty.

Harrison's daughter Emma, 4, was adopted from Vietnam. The pair traveled to Vietnam to help pick up the babies.

Fast Facts:

Arrivals in 2006

Immigrant visas issued to orphans coming to the United States and the top countries of origin:

1. 6,493 - China (mainland)

2. 4,135 - Guatemala

3. 3,706 - Russia

4. 1,376 - South Korea

5. 732 - Ethiopia

6. 587 - Kazakhstan

7. 460 - Ukraine

8. 353 - Liberia

9. 344 - Colombia

10. 320 - India

Source: U.S. Department of State

[Last modified January 26, 2007, 21:17:36]