The Family The Size Of A Baseball Team

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They are some of our favorites. Today, we bring you the story of the Bolander family. They’re from Kansas City and have a rather large family. Here’s Faith with the story.

Randy and Kelsey Bolander have ten kids, ranging from the age of twenty-seven years old to five years old.

Jackson, Grayson, Zion, Zoe, Anna, Mercy, Piper, Creed, Cadence, and Scout.

Six of the Bolander children are adopted, and their adoption stories have been nothing close to boring. When they adopted their first daughter, Zoe, they barely made it home from the hospital.

Could only get within about three or four hours of her. We couldn’t get right there overnight, so we flew till late end of the night, drove most of the night, and at eight o’clock the next morning, we were in her hospital room. We were still in Las Vegas, where she was born, and due to some paperwork snafoos, we had to stay in Las Vegas for about ten days. There, we were holed up in a little extended-stay hotel, and the social worker called me at the hotel. “We don’t have your fingerprints,” and I said, “Well, we filed the paperwork,” and she said, “Well, we don’t have the fingerprints.” “Maybe you should call the FBI,” and so I literally—it was like 1-800-FBI. It was just a general phone number. And left a voicemail. Oddly, they called me back, and they said, “We don’t seem to have it. I don’t know that we’ve ever had it. I don’t know what to tell you.” I call my social worker back. I explained that the FBI doesn’t know what we’re talking about, which is never a good sign. And she suggested that maybe we should get an apartment because we may be there for a while. I just went into a panic. I’m like, “I don’t want an apartment in Las Vegas. I’ve got a home in Kansas City that I really like to go to.” And she called us in about an hour and a half and said, “You know what? We found. We have your fingerprints. They’re right here. You are free to go.” I hung up the phone, and I looked at my wife, and I said, “Shut the phones off. I don’t know if she’s right or not, but we are leaving. We’re going back to Kansas City.” So we raced to the airport, barely in time for a five o’clock flight. There’s a seven o’clock fight. We would like dinner, so we opt for the seven. We sit down, we have dinner. We go get in line, and we sit and we wait. Seven becomes eight, eight becomes nine. The plane gets pushed back to ten o’clock. By now, I’m exhausted, I am a little bit panicky, and I’m thinking that I might be a fugitive. And I’m sitting there, holding this little girl, and I’ve read just enough John Grisham novels to know how this all works out. And so I’m looking around, trying to figure out, “Who is the FBI person here? Who thinks I’m leaving without my fingerprints?” The plane didn’t leave till two in the morning. We landed in Kansas City as the sun came up, and again, just a wave of emotion, and realized, “Wow, we did it, we made it. We’re home, and we have a little girl.”

A few years later, they adopted their twin daughters, Anna and Mercy. Before bringing the girls home, Randy had a very honest conversation with their birth mother.

She said, “I want to know how you feel about multiracial kids.” She was Japanese, Tie, and I said, “Well, I have a multiracial daughter at home. Zoe is African American, Latino. We are Caucasian, and I did not ask what race you were when I got on the plane. This is not an issue to us.” With that, we walked down the hall. She checked out these twin girls out of the nursery—well, little, tiny babies, didn’t even have names: Baby A and Baby B. We looked around, and there was a closet open, like a supply closet. We went into supply closet, and this lady did the bravest thing I’ve ever seen him alive. She kissed each one of them on the head and said, “This is your new Mommy and Daddy,” and handed Kelsey and me each a little girl, and said, “I need to go back to my room now,” and turned around and walked out. I had to drive across the street to Target and buy car seats because we left Kansas City with nothing, and I’m in the parking lot taking car seats out of boxes, and people are walking by, staring at me, thinking, “That is the most laxadaisical, lazy man in the world that he didn’t do this before,” and I want to try and confront him and say, “I didn’t know,” but that even made me look dumber, so I just ignored him. We stayed in Florida for another week in the area while they finished up paperwork, and social workers met with the birth mom just to make sure this was something she was fully on board with. And then we turned around and flew back to Kansas City with twin girls. We were home six weeks with the newborns with Anna and Mercy, and my wife motioned me to come down the hall. I went down the hall. We stepped into the bathroom, and she handed me a pregnancy test and screamed into a towel. And so we went from four to really quickly. Three years after Piper was born, I get a phone call, and it is Anna and Mercy’s birth mom’s sister, and I’m in my office, and she said, “We had lost track of their birth mom.” “She’d been homeless for a while, but I just got a call.” “She had been living in a U-Haul storage unit, and when they told her she had to leave, she said, ‘I don’t know if this is true or not,’ but she told the manager of the storage unit that she’s pregnant with twins.” I went from “Surely not” to “What are you going to do with the twins?” in about thirty seconds. In my mind, I saw my twin girls that I had at home, that were their siblings. But in my mind, they weren’t two or three years old, or however they were. They were fifteen, and in my mind, they were asking, “There were more like us, and you didn’t want them?” And I just couldn’t. I couldn’t bear that thought that they would ever think that we would not want more like them. We flew down, met with her, said, “You know, if you would like to keep your children together, we will willingly do this.” It was a little, you know, it was a little bumpy, but she agreed. Not long after that, we brought home a little boy and a little girl, Creed and Cadence. Three years after Creed and Cadence were born, late one night, my phone rings, and I recognize the number. It is the lawyer that we used for Creed and Cadence’s adoption. And I answered the phone, and he said, “Are you sitting down?” And I, you know, kind of instantly knew where this was going. He said, “We just found out that the two sets of twins’ birth mom had a little boy in the last couple of days, and he has been taken into state custody. But somebody at the hospital remembered that you had adopted the other four, and they called me, and they wanted you to know.”

And you’re listening to Randy Bolander tell the story of his, well, large family and how it came to be. And it’s not like typical large families come to be. Ten kids, six adopted. And when we come back, we’re going to hear more from this remarkable family, the Bolander family. Here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories and to Randy and Kelsey Bolander’s story. The Bolanders have ten kids, six of which are adopted, and five of their adopted children are siblings. We left off with the Bolanders about to adopt the fifth boy of that sibling group. He had just been taken into state custody. Let’s return to Randy.

Lawyer called me and said, “You guys need to come down here. We are going to remove him from state custody.” And so that’s what we did. We flew down and serve papers on the state, which was a real turn of the tables. They’re not accustomed to that. And about a week later, we flew home with Scout, and Scout was about three months old. You know, there’s a law of diminishing crazy. The amount of chaos that one child introduces to a home is not multiplied by the number of children in the home. Just the nature that there are children in the home means crazy is going to happen, and so it’s not like ten, or twice as crazy as five. We joke about nothing working for our family. Nothing normal works: normal house, normal car, nothing works. When we were all together under one roof, about, the only thing that would work was a Ford fifteen-passenger E three point fifty Super Duty Homeschooler Special van, big white van. I’m on my second. I’ve got one hundred eighty thousand miles on the second one. It’s the only thing that would work for all of us to go together. When we do go someplace, of course, people wonder. And I’ve kind of got a standing rule. When I notice somebody is watching and counting heads as I walk by, I whisper, “There’s more at home,” just to keep them wondering.

Even the cheapest of options for a family of ten isn’t.

Very cheap at a fast-food restaurant, especially with them getting a little bit bigger. If we just take the seven or eight that are usually with us, now you’re going to drop with Mom and Dad eating sixty-five, seventy bucks. You know, pizza is a three-digit affair. I had a friend one time. We were all at Chick-fil-A, their family and our family, and he was watching me, and he asked me, “When was the last time you sat down and ad a sandwich?” And I couldn’t really remember, because when you go into one of those places, you’re always kind of on new to your standing, opening the sauce, walking from this table to that table. And so, you know, I can stand in my own kitchen anita sandwich.

With so many children at home, being relationally intentional with all of them is no small task.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to go spend an hour with each child every day. It’s just the math. It doesn’t work. That said, one of the things that we have talked about from the time they were little was trying to figure out what is the key to their heart, what makes that child come alive, and how can we incorporate that into our day. Whether we’re as a group or we are one-on-one once in a while. It isn’t as much about quality time together. It’s about being known. And when they feel like they’re known, it doesn’t matter if they’re in a group of five, they feel individually known by a moment, a dad.

The Bolanders are passionate about ministry and adoption as a ministry in particular. In order to build on that, they found at Zoe’s House an adoption agency to help make the process a little easier for people.

We have had a lot of talks about under what circumstances would we do this again? And one of the things that we’ve realized is we’re not the only ones in the world that can do this, and we can help other people do it. And so we have taken steps towards how can we be the most productive in reproducing what we do rather than doing it all by ourselves. We had struggled with how adoption works and how it’s done. Like any industry, there are people of widely different abilities and intentions, and we thought it was one of those things in particular that should be done right. We were very fortunate. The people that we worked with were very ethical, were very kind, did a good job. But you start hearing stories, and you realize that sometimes it’s not done that way. Knowing that we were now kind of the adoption people. When you have ten kids, it’s the only thing anybody ever remembers about you. We knew we would be fielding these questions for the rest of our lives and knew that we would love to make a difference in how adoption is done. And so about five years ago, literally within a couple of days of finding out about Scout, someone approached us and said, “Would you ever consider starting an adoption agency that might be able to do this and make it a little more doable for people and do a better job?” And Kelsey and I have a long-running joke: when one of us wants to do something, if it’s something we’re not qualified to do or we just haven’t really been trained. In our joke, “Has anybody dumber than us ever done this?” You can almost always find someone. And so if we find one person who’s dumber than us, we say, “Well, we can do that.” They did it, and so we dove into it, and we hired very smart people, and they helped us considerably. We learned a lot and launched this adoption agency that has leaned into the idea of excellent birth mother care and also vary above the board honest dealings with adoptive families and just trying to make it the best experience that we can so that when it’s done, adoptive families can talk about it with their children and not have a sense of shame, and talk with honor towards their birth parents, which they deserve.

It’s easy to look at a family like the Bolanders and be intimid and not know how to go about having a family of ten, six of which are adopted. But how the Bolanders ended up where they are now wasn’t a step-by-step plan they set out on.

You know, how in the world could you have four and have adopt another six? We get asked that a lot. Well, it didn’t happen in one day. And yet people do that. You know, people adopt sibling groups. That wasn’t our case. Who would say yes to ten? We would just say yes to the next one? Can you do this one more time? Very rarely does anybody say yes to ten at one time. Very rarely does anybody ever get asked that question. But can you do one more? We found we had the capacity. We could do it.

Now.

There have been people who have kind of wondered, “Are you guys, you know, kind of hooked on doing a good thing?” And they forget the fact that of the last five, they were all biologically related, and so it wasn’t like we were cherry-picking children from around the world to complete a set. We were, for those last five, fighting to the nail to keep a family kids together. When you see other people that have done things that seem monumentous or a little out there, like adopting multiple kids or launching a business that went hugely successful or whatever. Don’t assume that they’ve got it any more together or any more talented than you are. They just said yes to an opportunity, and they’re figuring it out as they go along. People a lot of times will say, “Wow, you guys have great systems. You must have great systems to make life work.” Well. No, actually, our laundry room: it’s chaos. No, there, we don’t have any great systems. We just do life like everybody else, just at a larger scale. And so I think I’ve learned that those who I’ve looked at and gone, “Wow, they’ve done things I didn’t know that I could do.” Maybe I could do them if the door opened. The other thing would be not to wait until you have things all figured out until you try and do some good. Problem-solving is a great skill, but you can’t solve problems if you don’t know what they are. And so to dive into them and to figure out what the next problem is and how I can fix it, you find yourself, you know, twenty, thirty years down the road, having done things you would have never thought you could have done, or said yes to. One of the things I am proudest of in life is how my older boys have leaned into adoption. You know, we’re in ministry. The pie is only so big, and every time we have adopted, the slice of the pie would seem to get a little smaller for everyone. When we brought home twins, they fought their way to the front of the crowd and the foyer of the house to be the first ones to hold the twins. And it was one of the most gratifying things as a father that I’ve ever experienced. The value, and the joy, and the fun, and the personality that the adopted ones have brought to the table, I think, has so overwhelmed any sense of what might have been in a different world that the older ones just can’t imagine not having been like that. And they grew up in a house where there was always something going on. Fun was kind of a byproduct of the house. It still is. It’s a very fun, very loud, crazy place. It’s been chaotic, but it’s not been boring.

And a great job as always by Faith, and a special thanks to Randy and Kelsey Bolander for sharing their story—their family story. Oh, and by the way, you can find out more about the Bolanders’ mission at ZoesHouseAdoptions.com. And a special thanks to our friend in Kansas City, E. J. Becker, for bringing us this story—the Bolander family story of real beauty. Here on Our American Stories.