Celebrity Baby Shower Gift

Thursday we received a box from my parents with gifts for Aneyah. I talked to my Mom and Dad later Thursday evening and Mom said, "Go ahead and open them!" Some of what is opened I may want to take to China. With each one of our daughter's adoptions, my parents have supplied similar gifts to each girl. So, this is Aneyah's box of those gifts. Friday after dinner, we decided to open the gifts. There were 6 wrapped gifts so we each opened one. With the six gifts there was a quilt that my Mom had embroidered nursery rhyme characters on as well as gave a nursery rhyme book. One important gift always given by my parents is the girl's first Bible. To us, the most important gift of all! She also did a pillow case for Aneyah with cute characters on it.

CORONA, CA: Last Sunday, at a golf course lounge in the deep suburbs of Los Angeles, there were two fairy tales on display. One was broadcast by CBS and ended with the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl. The other, far more improbable saga was unfolding in a corner of the room, where Kermit Alexander spent the afternoon hanging out with his five new children.

The Alexander clan is not your typical nuclear family. Kermit is a 69-year-old ex-NFL star who played defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers and brief stints with the Rams and Eagles, and whose life has been marked by public acclaim and unspeakable tragedy. His wife Tami, 48, is a former California Highway Patrol dispatcher, a young grandmother, and the owner of a thriving gift-basket company. Both have adult children from previous marriages, and neither expected to be a parent again when they were married in 2004.

The five kids, who range in age from 9 to 16, are equally unconventional. They are orphans from Haiti, three brothers and two sisters who were given up by their father -- who later died -- after their mother fell ill with malaria.

The story of how this family came together -- and how the siblings ultimately journeyed from an earthquake-stricken island to a Super Bowl party in southern California -- is a tale straight out of Hollywood. Over the last five years, Kermit and Tami navigated a minefield of vague paperwork, red tape, dashed hopes, political instability and natural disasters in their effort to adopt the children. It has been, says Kermit, "a trial of perseverance."

The journey begins

The odyssey began in 2003. Tami was working for a Christian music station in Redlands, CA, reporting on traffic and weather for the morning commute show. She was approached by Compassion International, a child-advocacy group that works with prominent Christian music acts, to take part in a mission to Haiti. She was hesitant to go, but figured the trip might help her station make a connection with an influential organization.

Shortly after arriving in Haiti, she was haunted by the country's decrepit facilities and abject poverty -- and wanted to leave. "I had never seen anything like that in my life," she says. "There was nothing I could do to bring about change. My thought was, 'How can a place be this close to the United States and be so forsaken?'"

The trip organizers convinced her to stay and visit Mission of Hope, a large children's home founded by an American couple on the outskirts of Port Au Prince. At the facility, she was approached by a little boy named Clifton, who inexplicably began calling her "mom" and trailed her every move. She spoke with the boy in French and was immediately smitten.

Towards the end of the trip, Tami walked up to the top of a hill on the mission's grounds and enjoyed the breeze blowing off the Caribbean, which reminded her of childhood visits to the windmill of her family's farm in Texas. She asked the mission's directors if they had ever thought of installing a windmill for the facility. As it turned out, the Mission was desperate to defray its high energy costs and reduce its dependence on diesel fuel, which often was in short supply and controlled by corrupt profiteers in Haiti.

Tami returned to California with a new zeal for helping Haiti and a powerful bond with Clifton. Kermit and Tami founded a charitable organization to raise funds for wind and solar-power equipment in Haiti, and she began visiting Clifton every three or four months. It was a commitment she worried might scare off Kermit, who she had been dating, off-and-on, for nearly a decade before they were married. "I gave Kermit the out before our wedding. I told him if this isn't something you want, you've got to tell me," says Tami.

Kermit had his own connection to the island. The oldest of 14 children, Kermit was born in New Iberia, LA., the home of the McIlhenny Tabasco Company, where many of the employees had descendants who came through Haiti as slaves. Kermit's maternal grandmother spoke a dialect of Creole, the native tongue for most Haitians, and he grew up hearing the language at home. "I was always curious about Haiti," he says. "When I finally went there, it was like being back in Louisiana."

The couple began traveling regularly to Haiti and gave money to sponsor Clifton. Unlike most of the country's child-care facilities, though, Mission for Hope is not set up as an orphanage. Its goal is to raise a generation of kids that will "change the nation one kid at a time," according to Marilyn Waterman, the organization's U.S. administrator in Lees Summit, Mo. "We don't want them to leave."

After several visits, the Mission's director gave Kermit and Tami a choice: Start the adoption process with Clifton -- or stop visiting him altogether, because the boy would get depressed and sick every time they left. The couple soon began collecting the paperwork to bring Clifton to California. On a subsequent trip, they brought Clifton on a visit to a nearby orphanage and he immediately began playing well with a group of kids at the home. The children, Clifton said, were his siblings -- and the Alexanders were floored.

"I told Tami we can't leave these kids here and we can't separate Clifton from his siblings," Kermit says. "So we decided to take all of them." It was easier said than done.

Cruel twist of fate

Like Clifton, Kermit had personal experience with the trauma of losing a loved one. On the night of August 31, 1984, Kermit's mother, sister, and two nephews were murdered by gang members in one of L.A.'s most brutal homicides. The killers shot his mother while she was drinking coffee, then executed the others in their beds. The men believed they were making a hit on a drug dealer in South Central Los Angeles -- but got the wrong house. Kermit's family had the heinous misfortune of living at a similar address as the targeted criminal.

In a particularly cruel twist of fate, Kermit later realized that he knew one of the convicted murderers from a youth football league. "I coached against his team, and he was a troubled kid, but he was such a brilliant football player," Kermit says. "I kept telling people to do something about him, but I didn't do anything."

"I came from a huge family -- this is a way of life for me. We don't leave kids behind." -- Kermit Alexander

For years, the murders cast a pall over Kermit's personality. "There was a strong edge to him," says Tami, who first met Kermit in 1991 and was unaware of the crime. "It was still very raw for him for a long time."

He never discussed the tragedy with her, even after strangers would come up to them at the movies or while shopping and offer condolences about his family. After years of avoiding the subject, she finally brought it up while they were driving to a Mexican restaurant in Orange County. "He floored the pedal, screeched into the parking lot, looked at me with his veins popping as he said, 'I'm going to tell you the story once from start to finish and you can't stop me,' " Tami recalls.

Time, therapy and a renewed commitment to religion helped Kermit move past his guilt and sense of loss. The memory of the murders, he concedes, was also "a motivating factor" for him to pursue the adoptions in Haiti. "I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to my mother," he says. "I came from a huge family -- this is a way of life for me. We don't leave kids behind."

Stuck in adoption limbo

The decision to adopt all five children, of course, was just the first step in an arduous and incredibly frustrating process. At various times over the past five years, Kermit and Tami believed the children were on verge of leaving -- only to be stymied by political upheaval in Haiti or the smallest oversights in their paperwork. They also paid $40,000 a year for Clifton's siblings to live in a boarding school run by Haitian-Americans, where the children lived in far better conditions and were taught English. When the recession forced them to reduce expenses, Kermit and Tami transferred the four children to a different orphanage, also run by an American couple, in Port Au Prince.

Three years ago, they were so sure about the adoption that they prepared the kids' rooms and purchased a champagne-colored Chevy Suburban to ferry them all to school. (The kids never arrived, but they kept the car.) "Every year, people would look at us like we were crazy," Tami says. At parties, she and Kermit would be introduced as "the people trying to adopt all those kids."

Undaunted, they hired a lawyer in Port Au Prince to help with the process and got in touch with a Los Angeles family that had been successful in adopting a Haitian boy. "There are almost zero people who really know the answers," Tami says. Last summer, frustrated by yet another delay, she showed up at the lawyer's office with all five kids and demanded to know why a form was missing from their latest application. After searching through multiple cabinets, the lawyer looked again at the family's original file -- and found the missing document.

"There were times when we knew we could have taken an easier route and just paid for the adoption," she says. "The more we did it the right way, the harder it became."

By Christmas of last year, the couple truly believed that two of the children , Clifton, who's now 12, and Semfia, the baby of the group who is 9, would be arriving in early 2010, with the other three hopefully following soon. Then the 7.1 earthquake hit on Jan. 12.

Disastrous circumstances yield results

Tami first heard the news while driving on the freeway and immediately called Kermit. When he confirmed the news, she says, "I just started crying. I don't know how I made it home."

The next few hours were torture as the couple waited for any updates about the children. At approximately 7 p.m. that night, they got a call from a representative of Hearltine Ministry, another mission in Haiti, that their children were alive and the facilities where they lived were largely intact. Luckily, according to Tami, the siblings in Port Au Prince had been playing outside when the earthquake first hit and were not near windows or debris.

The couple then began an all-out phone blitz, dialing every person they could think of to help expedite their adoption and get the children out of Haiti. They got invaluable help from Gary Hoffman, a Los Angeles radio reporter whose wife helps run an orphanage in Haiti. Through that connection, Tami was able to get in touch with Whitney Reitz at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which was tasked with prioritizing adoptions after the earthquake.

After nearly two weeks of phone calls and dread, the Alexanders were told that four of the five children were scheduled to fly out of Haiti on Jan. 24. The only one not cleared was Clifton, the boy who first approached Tami and set the whole saga in motion six years earlier.

Panicked, Tami began calling her contacts at the Mission of Hope to try to get Clifton to the orphanage in Port Au Prince, where a military vehicle was scheduled to pick up the other siblings and take them to the airport. "I prayed for the miracle of phone service," Tami says. And a blessing came down from the technology gods: Through a Skype line that forwarded to a cell phone in Haiti, she was able to arrange for a driver to ferry Clifton from Mission of Hope to the city, where the boy was reunited with his siblings.

The children were put on planes and flown to a military airport outside of Orlando. (Clifton actually flew on a cargo plane, apart from his siblings, because he did not have the same paperwork.) It then took nearly 24 hours to have them processed and they spent a night in an immigration holding room. Kermit and Tami hurriedly packed bags for all five kids and took a red-eye flight to Florida.

Finally on the evening of Jan. 26, an agent brought the Alexanders into the immigration room to see the kids, and the newly intact family flew back to California the next day. "It was a process, not an event," Tami says. "We're kind of giddy about it."

A few days later, the U.S. military halted flights and the Haitian government suspended adoptions amid complaints about human trafficking and overzealous missionaries. According to the latest estimates, 230,000 people were killed by damage caused by the earthquake.

The past Monday, the Alexander kids started school. Article

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