The Miraculous Story of a Boy Named Juan Carlos

Saturday was the one year anniversary of my boy's homegoing.  It has been a whirlwind of a year, hard to believe that much time has passed.  I miss him every day and I have held it together pretty well, I think.  We all have.  Our faith in God and our confident knowledge that he is with Jesus, living his real life has to be the reason for this.  For it is illogical to think that time should move on and people should be going about their everyday lives as if all was normal, when John's earthly life is over, and our lives will never be the same.  I would be lying if I didn't admit that it's been hard the past few months.  I guess the shock is wearing off.  His shoes are still right by the back door.  The clean clothes he had set on his desk in our sun room are still sitting there.  He put them there after a workout and I guess had planned to wear them after a shower.  Who knows why they were there, since he was spending the night at his friend's house the day before his accident. 

That would have been something I would have noticed and yelled at him about.  He was always leaving his stuff laying around and I was always telling him to put things away. Of course, the first time I noticed them I cried.  The next time I noticed them I was mad and then I decided I would not move them...ever.  But sometimes, when no one else is home, I do yell..."JOHN, WHY ARE YOUR CLOTHES LAYING AROUND IN THE SUNROOM????  FOR THE 500th TIME, QUIT LEAVING YOUR STUFF LAYING ALL OVER THE HOUSE."   I wait for him to come into the room with his sheepish grin and the silly way he would fiddle with his fingers when he was "in hot water" about something and say, "oh sorry Mom".  But he never comes and I know he never will.  

I've had so many people sending prayers and kind words to me this week and I started thinking about how it all began.  It is a truly miraculous story...one completely designed by God.  The details make that perfectly clear, because as they say...God is in the details.  So in memory of my dear son....Here is the miraculous adoption story of our boy, Juan Carlos Crisostomos Ramos Brandt.  I’ve included some back story because I think it lends to proof of God’s hand in every desire we have…which I believe He instills in us, some even from childhood.

As a young girl I always thought I would have 4 children.  It was a nice sounding number.  I wanted a big family, because growing up I only had a brother and I always wanted more siblings.  My brother and I are adopted, biological siblings and both adopted at birth…that’s a story for another time!  Somewhere in my late teens and early 20's, my desire for children faded.  My husband and I both decided we didn’t want any children.  We were going to travel the world and be the fun Aunt and Uncle.  A couple years into our marriage, we bought a house in a new subdivision and met a couple with two little girls.  We became fast friends and we loved those girls as if they were our own, and we thought we could have kids if they were like Anne Marie and Casey. 

So after being married almost 5 years, we had our first daughter on June 16, 1995.  I had planned to have my children 18 mos apart, because don’t you know we always think we can plan these things?!   But God had other plans.  All was on track, we became pregnant and I thought my plan was in motion, but at 4 months I had a miscarriage.  I believe that God designed our family on Earth to include Olivia, Lily, John, and August.  Only He knows why those lives needed to be placed together in a home with Paul and I as parents.  Only He knows why He needed our baby to live only 4 months in utero before going back home to Him.  His ways are higher and His purposes are a mystery on this side of Heaven.   I rallied after a few months, got pregnant again, and we had our second daughter on September 9, 1997. 

All was well, and I was loving life until about September/October of 1998.  I had this deep longing for a child.  It was almost pathological and it was all consuming.  I really didn’t understand it because we were all just fine and happy.  Paul was not really interested in any more kids and so I would try to squelch my desire for another child.  Although I loved being pregnant, I didn’t think I ever wanted to give birth again.   I was always afraid something terrible would happen to Paul when I was pregnant, and I really didn’t want to go through nine months of worry.  We had a lot of responsibilities with caring for my brain injured brother and ailing parents and the thought of doing it on my own was scary.  Plus I had been adopted and I thought I would want to give a home to a child that needed one.

A friend adopted a child from India, and I thought that was a great alternative to my situation.  So I talked my husband into going to international adoption seminars.  It was all too expensive and unrealistic for our situation.  The cost for most international adoptions was over $30,000.   Most countries wanted you to go and stay for a few weeks and we would never have gone without each other and we had no where to leave our daughters, so it seemed that door was closed.  Yet, I still wanted more children.  Then I got pregnant and had my son on March 17, 2001.  We went ‘round and ‘round on names for him.  We settled on two:  August Alexander or John August.  We finally settled on August Alexander, but I always wanted a son named John, so it was a hard decision!   

Flash forward a few years.  We were settled into a routine with 3 kids and all seemed great on the outside, but inside I was still missing a child.  I would go on Precious.org’s website and look at all the children’s pictures and pray for them.  One day, December 29, 2003, I was online and Paul was due home any minute.  I was scrolling through pics and this face appeared.  He looked like my son August and he had a look on his face that said, “Come and get me, Mom!”  I couldn’t stop looking at his face and Paul walked in and I asked him to come look.  I showed him the picture and said this is our son, we have to go get him.  He looked at me like I was a nut and said, “It’s all on you.” At the time, I was homeschooling my kids and did not want to deal with any DFS or gov’t agencies and to adopt kids you need to get a home study.  I think he thought I would not go any further, but my need to get my son was more important than my fear of being hassled by the gov’t for homeschooling. 

So the next morning I called the adoption agency.  It was located in Florida and the social worker, Sue, answered the phone.  I told her that I had seen a boy named Carlitos on Precious.org’s website and I wanted to adopt him.  She laughed and said, “well ok, first things first.  Do you have a homestudy?”  I said no.  She said, “are you in contact with an agency to have one done?”  I said no.  She said, ”well, we really don’t do adoptions quite like this.  You can’t just pick a child and get him.  You need to have a home study done and get all your paperwork done and then we will assign a child to you.  It could take at least 6 mos before we would even begin to assign a child”.  I said, “well, I understand that, but this boy Carlitos is my son and I need to get him”.  I asked her to tell me about him.  She said that he was 5 and that he would be 6 in October.  She kept calling him Juan Carlos and she said he was left in a hospital at  18 mos old because he was so sickly. She said that he had some kind of lung disease and that he was sickly and frail and had been tossed around from different homes.   I said, “ok, I can deal  with that, can we get this process going”.

She continued calling him Juan Carlos and I said, "are we talking about the same boy?" The boy I’m referring too is listed as Carlitos.  She said, "Yes, in Guatemala boys go by their middle name and are called little, so he was Carlitos, which means little Carlos, but Juan means John in English."   Then she told me he was born on October 28, 1998.  I told her I knew he was meant to be my son and she said, “well, I can’t hold him for you, but if you get to work on the paperwork, we will see what will happen”.  We finished up exchanging information and ended the conversation and I called Lutheran Family Services. 

We completed our home study and the copious amounts of paperwork in 5 months.   Sue was incredulous and we decided to go visit him over Memorial Day weekend.  The way Guatemala adoptions were structured, if you visited the child before the paperwork was finalized, he would become an automatic US citizen and would not need to be readopted in the States.  Also, we wanted to meet him, because Guatemala allowed a child to be escorted and there would be no need to go back to the country for the finalizing of the paperwork.  We thought about having him escorted, so we thought it best to meet him so he wouldn’t be terrified when they brought him to us in the airport. 

We decided to take our 3 children with us, because we wanted this done as a family and we didn’t want to leave orphans if something happened to us on the way to adopt a child.  The Friday we were to leave, my oldest was still sick with a fever and sore throat.  She had been dealing with it for a couple days and I had taken her to the doctor hoping it was strep so she could get some antibiotics.  It was not strep, but a virus.  I went back and forth about leaving her home with our parents, but in the end I just couldn’t.  So the poor kid was drugged up on Motrin and went along.  She was a trooper and fortunately no one else caught the bug.  It was so important to me that we go as a family.

We spent a wonderful weekend with our boy at a Guatemalan family’s home.  There was a very warm and generous family that had a bed and breakfast set up for adoptive families.   We stayed at the home and they fed us and we basically lived with John for the weekend.  He was so cute.  He was a total clown and he was a ball of energy.  We didn’t speak Spanish and he didn’t speak English or much Spanish, for that matter. I had few people ask how we thought we could communicate with this child, so in the days before we left for Guatemala,  I wrote out a bunch of phrases that you would say, in the course of a day, as you were dealing with your child, and I translated them and kept them in a notebook.  Armed with my Spanish dictionary and notebook, I went to Guatemala prepared to explain to this boy that we were going to be his new family. 

The weekend went amazingly well and I didn’t want to let him go.  He became fast friends with the kids and they all loved him.  It was like he had always been ours.  I kept hoping and praying that they would let us take him home, but it was not to be.  We had to leave him and I cried most of the way back to the US.  We had to wait until August to get him back and so I had 3 months of the worst labor pains imaginable.  I was so worried about him and missed him and time could not move fast enough. The process was finally completed and we decided we would go back and get him, rather than having him escorted.  The whole family flew to Guatemala to pick him up and the paperwork was signed on August 29, 2004.  He was now officially Juan Carlos Brandt.

Now here are the miracles associated with this boy:

- He was born October 28, 1998.  That was the time when I was feeling so desperate and like I was missing a child.

- His name was Juan Carlos, which is John Charles in English.  If you recall, we were very close to naming our son August, John.

- I always knew I would have a son named John and I did have those 4 children that God had planted a desire for so many years ago.

- The cost of his adoption was $35,000. We had sold our house 2 years before and made a very large profit, so the cash was sitting in the bank.

-Not only did we pick him and turn the normal adoption process on its head, but from the time I saw his picture to the time we brought him home was exactly 8 months to the day.  The average international adoption time frame is 2-3 years!

-We did not speak a lick of Spanish and he didn’t speak English or much Spanish, yet we communicated just fine and within 6 mos he was speaking English.  One day, I explained that in English his name translated to John.  I asked him if he wanted us to continue to call him Juan Carlos, or if he wanted to be called John.  He said, “I want to be John, Mom”.

- Sue, the social worker made many claims throughout the process, that John was frail and sickly and had some type of lung disorder.  Not only was that untrue…he was very healthy all through his life and didn’t even need braces on his teeth.  But the testament to his healthy and robust body came a few days after his accident.  It was clear to the medical staff and to me that he was brain dead.  Because he was so young and no one wants to give up on a young life, they assumed his heart would give out and then he would be both brain dead with no heartbeat.  His heart raced for three days at over 170 beats a minute and yet it never quit.  He was a swimmer all of his life and a triathlete.  He was a strong, athletic, fit young man and never a sickly or frail boy.

I use to tell John that he was the luckiest boy in the world.  I told him that most children have God and a mom and dad that love them.  But he had three sets of loving parents.  He was loved by his mother who made a courageous decision to put him up for adoption, because she knew she could not give him the care he needed.  He was loved by God the Father, who protected him and put the desire in a family's heart to bring him home and teach him about Jesus.  And he was loved by that far off family that lived on another continent and went searching for him to bring him home.  

I wish we could have had more time together, but I'm so grateful that God picked us to love him during his time on this Earth.  See you again, my boy, until then your clothes will be right where you left them.