PORT ANGELES — Carmen and Kevin Haskins agree: When you adopt, you don’t expect perfect little angels.
Walk into the Haskins’ household, yet, and you get a distinct feeling that everyone here fits. Perfectly.
When Carmen and Kevin married 15 years ago, they planned on adopting. They were living in Valparaiso, Ind., so they contacted an agency there, and began the process of adopting a child from Guatemala.
Then Carmen got pregnant. She gave birth to her son, Lucas, just about three weeks after her 24th birthday.
“He was a surprise, a great surprise,” Carmen says, looking at her son, who had just finished dinner with his parents and three of his siblings last Sunday.
Carmen, Kevin and Lucas traveled to Guatemala four years later, where they met baby Ileana. She was to become Lucas’ little sister and the Haskins’ first daughter. The baby girl had no health problems, but she was a fussy infant, and then a tough toddler.
“She is my strong-willed one,” Carmen says. Carmen, 38, grew up with three siblings in Kenai, Alaska — and she was her mother’s strong-willed one, too. After high school, she went off traveling across Central and South America for two years, before winning a scholarship to Indiana Wesleyan University. While there, she met Kevin, then a student at Ball State University.
After Ileana came home, the young family of four moved to the Northwest, where most of Carmen’s family still lives. They happened to find Port Angeles, and after exploring the place, they fell in love with it and settled here.
It was 2002, and Carmen and Kevin were far from finished having children. They went to Adoption Advocates International, the Port Angeles agency that helps families adopt children from Washington state’s foster care system, as well as from seven foreign countries.
Adoption Advocates matched the Haskins family with Abel, a baby boy living at Layla House, the orphanage the agency operates in Ethiopia. And so Carmen flew across the world and back, bringing home an infant with multiple medical problems.
Abel is 8 now, and while he’s small, he fairly sparkles with health. And he is big brother to Aiden, 3, who also came to the family with “a long list of special needs,” Carmen says.
Aiden was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate. He joined the Haskins household at 2 years old, after some time in the state foster care system. Carmen and Kevin had to learn how to feed him with a tube; they also had to teach him to walk.
Today, Aiden scampers around the house, tickling a visiting reporter and asking questions that aren’t easy to make out. Abel is the one who best understands what his parents call “Aidenese.”
So this is a full house — but we’re not done yet.
At around 8 p.m., Kevin goes out to pick up the Haskins’ eldest son, Tamrat. The 18-year-old has his driver’s license but has yet to get insurance. His parents told him he had to get a job to help pay for that. He recently found work as a grocery clerk at Safeway; after his Sunday shift there, he burst into the house and headed for the table, where taco fixings await.
Tamrat joined the family six years ago; he is one of several teenagers who have come to this community by way of Adoption Advocates. Carmen traveled to Ethiopia, again to Layla House, to pick him up. He was 12 then, “on paper,” she says, although orphans’ records are not always reliable.
Adoption Advocates, however, has been “wonderful,” Carmen says. “We get all kinds of support,” whether she and Kevin are coping with their child’s medical problems or with some extremely difficult behavior. The latter is the hardest, Kevin says.
But as Aiden cavorts around the dining room, Abel chatters and Lucas sits down at the computer a few feet away, Carmen and Kevin smile at each other.
“Aiden is such a smart little guy,” Carmen says. “It has been so much fun; to watch him go from the kid nobody wanted to this boy everybody comments on,” for being irresistibly cute.
He has come a long way, as have his parents.
“I knew nothing about feeding tubes,” Carmen says.
Aiden has undergone six surgeries, and a seventh is scheduled in 2012. These days he dines like any toddler and relishes taco night with his siblings, including the part when he gets to put the black olives on his fingertips.
Carmen home schools everyone except Tamrat, who is a senior at Port Angeles High School. At the same time, she says, her kids teach her plenty, about life and love.
“I’ve learned things,” she says with another huge grin, “that have stretched me.”
Watching her children change — Ileana into a young woman who loves to cook, Aiden into a joyous toddler, Tamrat into a young man who might go back to Ethiopia to work at Layla House — has made her feel blessed beyond measure.
This Thanksgiving may have been the Haskins family’s last one in Port Angeles. Until recently, Kevin ran his own Internet-based business selling audio components, but that wasn’t doing well amid the recession, so he’s found a new sales job — with good benefits — in Seattle. Carmen and the kids will move over there once their house sells.
Until then, the Haskins clan is enjoying Port Angeles. Last Saturday, the family took part in the Turkey Trot, an Adoption Advocates fundraiser on the Waterfront Trail. Ileana did it on her scooter and Aiden rode in a stroller while Tamrat and Abel ran the whole 5 kilometers.
“We’re just nuts,” Kevin jokes.
As for the possibility of adopting more children, neither he nor Carmen
rule it out.
“We’ve been through the financial wringer in the last few years,” Kevin says.
But, his wife adds, the family has what it needs. They have one another, and a Costco membership.
When the group goes shopping, “we are noticeable,” Carmen says. The receipt-checkers at the Costco warehouse door often ask things like, “Did you mean to buy three boxes of waffles?”
