Adoption Under One Roof

Today's guest blog is from John, a retired commercial airline pilot who has adopted four boys from domestic foster care as a single parent. John and his family live in southern California.

I have written about my 18-year-old son Chad, and his medical emergency in Berlin Germany. That blog is titled “RAD DAD AND THINGS GONE BAD – UNSAFETY,” if you would like to read about it. Believe it or not this event happened earlier on the same trip. Kids make life exciting. It was a beautiful day, about 4PM. We were enjoying Frankfurt, and Chad asked to go to the train station (Hbf). We had been to Frankfurt enough that he was very familiar with the area. My son, Thomas and I, knew he was going to use a phone card and call his girl friend.

A lot of time passed, and we began to get concerned. Finally, he appeared, very excited. He had seen a “street person” going into the station and three German police officers. He was wearing a ‘hoody’. In the middle of the phone call to his girlfriend, someone reached around from behind him, and jerked the hood part of the hoody over his face, so he couldn’t see anything. The thief quickly took his wallet from his pants pocket, and ran off. Chad did NOT yell “HELP POLICE, THIEF.” You see, he has Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ODD, so instead of ‘I won’t do it, and you can’t make me’, it becomes ‘You will not do that and let me show you why!’