Ahhh… it’s been a while. The adoption journey has been a bumpy ride. We are certainly on that roller coaster ride that we have heard so much about in our classes. We didn’t share our latest news with many until we knew more details, but now that we are over that hill & moving on to the next we are ready to share! Hold on to your hats Ladies & Gentlemen & please keep all hands inside the car! Its a wild ride :)

July 14th I received an email from my friend Bentley & then a text message telling me to go read my email. I knew it had to be important! Bentley is also in the process of adopting & actually had just returned the day before from meeting the birthmother that they are going to adopt a baby girl due in Sept!! (See adoption does work!)

The email was a forward from a “birthmother” who had contacted Bentley. He replied to her told her he had just recently been matched but asked if he could send her info to us.
She later responded & agreed. Bentley again texted messaged me & said it was a go & I could call her if I would like. My first thought was… oh great now what do I do? What do I ask, What do I say to her, I have never talked to a birth mom before….. I was sick I was so nervous. I waited until I got home to call. Once I got home I calledher. I spoke to Tiffany for about 20 minutes. In our first call she told me she was 16 weeks pregnant, she was married, she was a substitute teacher, she asked if she could come visit us here in KS, if we wanted her to deliver here or where she lived in Oh. WOW that’s a loaded question.. I still wanted to get to know her.
I asked her things like if the baby’s father knew she was considering adoption. She told me “well its not the typical pregnancy”. I said OK… not sure what was coming next.
Tiffany then told me that she was originally in a Surrogacy arrangement that went bad. She immediately said she had proof of custody of the babies that she had been to court & in the courts eyes the babies are hers & her husbands.
She said she had tried placing with an agency but that they wouldnt work with her because of the babies( I thought this was really odd)
Did you notice that… I said BABIES… with an S… As Tiffany & I talked she mentioned she was having more than one baby… even more than two babies… yep she was having TRIPLETS…. WOWZA! I don’t remember much after this point. For a few minutes all I could think of was John freaking out when I tell him that there were 3, I had to think of a cleaver way to tell him it was going to be ok & that we would figure it out. But I had to convince myself first!
I continued to talk to Tiffany she told me about her “big Greek family”, her husband Brian, more about the Surrogate story we talked like we were old friends. It wasn’t awkward or anything like I was expecting.
She wanted to call me back later because she was at work… I said that was fine… She called back & we talked later that evening for just a few minutes.
Between her calls I ran up stairs to tell John what was going on. The look on his face when I said triplets was awesome… why I didn’t bring the camera I will never know.
We spent the evening talking about finances, me staying home, triplets, praying, diapers, triplets, finances & triplets! Did I mention that we were both a bit nervous by the triplets thing? But we also booth agreed that if this was God’s plan for us then this is what we will do & we will figure the rest out later! We were doing fertility treatments there was a chance we could have had biological triplets!
The next day we(Tiffany & I) emailed back & forth & with John through out the day about various things. Just getting to know each other, nothing really exciting. She mentioned her husband was getting ready to join the military, Marines to be exact.
July 16th I started to wonder how much of this was true, it was all sinking in & I was thinking clearer (the triplets thing was wearing off). The same time John spoke to our pastor & Ken said to pray for wisdom. We definitely got the wisdom we prayed for. I found many many many posts on various websites about TiffanyM & the email address she was using to contact us. My heart sank.
The more I Google searched her name & email address the more I found. I spent several hours looking online & found enough to convince me this wasn’t real & there were plenty of people online questioning her story. We had also contacted our attorney by this point who had given us some advice & agreed that some of the things we thought were a bit suspicious were indeed red flags & typical “scammer” signs… Yes we were in the process of being scammed. We asked Tiffany for the items our attorney asked for, then we suddenly stopped hearing from her… she removed me as a friend from her MySpace page, she wouldn’t reply to text messages, phone calls, she obviously figured out that we have figured her out, or at least that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with us.

I was angry. I was so angry for a few days, lucky my husband is a better person than I am & told me that being angry at her gets us nothing. I wasn’t emotionally attached to the idea of finally being a mom to these babies yet so I wasn’t heart broken like I thought I would be but I was angry, bitterly angry.
She didn’t get money from us, she wasted some of our time but that is really all. So why am I so angry?… Adoption is complicated. It is an invasive stressful process involving lots of time, money, emotions, there are laws & policies that make it complicated. So for someone to make up a story like this makes me so angry. She is adding more complications to it than is needed. There are children waiting for loving families, there are families waiting for babies to start a family.

Then we had a sermon at church last Sunday about being angry vs being forgiving… once again I think God told Ken that I needed a talk! I so needed that sermon. I need to get over Tiffany & her fake triplet story & stop wasting my time & energy being so angry at her. I guess I am still angry about the fact that there are scammers that do this to people. But I am over our situation. I still pray for Tiffany. I have just changed my prayer for healthy pregnancy & healthy babies. I pray that she does something more productive with her life. I hope the next family is knows to research & dig as deep as they can to protect their emotions, their family & their finances.


*jennifer

Info For other adopting families.... email if you would like the links to the websites I found.
**Red flags from the many hours of research I have done & our Attorney**
An attorney who has done adoption law for 25+years.

Triplets- Very Rare! Especially with serrogate situations- the way that insemination is done its highly unlikely for triplets to happen!
Agency will not turn a birth mom away because of triplets- Our attorney said he could match her with several families in a heartbeat.
Serrogate situation as she explained it to us sounds unlikely to happen that way & for her to get custody even more unlikely.
The fact that in the first conversation she asked to come visit- she didnt know us, already she was asking to come visit? I read online that alot of times these people cash the ticket in for money & never arrive. Thats how they get your $.
She told us on day 2(less than 24 hrs of talking to us) that we were the family she wanted to work with. "the babies inside me are telling me that your the family for me" was what she said. At no time in the 2 weeks we talked to her did we ever commet to adopting the babies...