GETTING CHILDREN, PARENTS TOGETHER

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)

Author: JEREMY KAHN PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

Dateline: NORTH ROYALTON

Soggy grass and gray skies did not dampen the spirits of about 65 adopted children and their families who traveled from across the country for a picnic yesterday at the home of the woman who made their adoptions possible.

For the last three years, Margaret Cole, who founded European Adoption Consultants in 1991, has transformed her North Royalton back yard into a small carnival for her clients. The event, complete with pony rides and a petting zoo featuring a llama and a miniature highland steer from Australia, is her way of bringing together the families that she has helped adopt children abroad.

"I have known every one of these people but to see them all in one place takes your breath away," Cole said yesterday as she looked around at the crowd, some from as far away as Georgia, assembled on her lawn.

Most of the children adopted through Cole's agency are from Eastern Europe, but she has also helped families adopt children from China, Kazakhstan,

and Guatemala.

While their children bounced happily on a nearby trampoline, petted a family of box turtles or played on Cole's jungle gym, parents shared stories of traveling thousands of miles to find their new sons and daughters and traded tips on how to acclimate the children to life in the United States.

Dan and Jill Zaranec of Parma had just returned from

, where they stayed several weeks in an apartment with only cold running water while finalizing the adoption of their 4-year-old daughter, Natalie.

"Molodova is a very poor country," Dan Zaranec said. "But the orphanage was real good, and the trip was ultimately worth the hardships, because we got to come home with Natalie."

Christina Malysz, 6, of Seven Hills, said the children had no toys to play with at the

orphanage where she lived until 1993, when she was adopted by Ray and Vera Malysz.

Like many of the children in Eastern European orphanages, Christina had a lazy eye - which now has been corrected with glasses - due to spending hours alone in a crib staring at her fingers when she was an infant. Some of the other children had diseases and vitamin deficiencies when they were picked up by their adoptive parents. And some of the children had developmental problems.

Many of the couples Cole's agency helps are between 40 and 55 years old, considered too old to be adoptive parents by most American agencies. Other couples chose to adopt foreign orphans because they said domestic adoption takes too long and they did not want to take the risk that the child's birth mother would want to keep the child.

Cole understands the difficulties many of her client families have faced.

Five years ago, Cole, 47, was sitting on her mother's porch, mourning the loss of her 6-week-old daughter, Alicia, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

But the mother of two knew she wanted another child. Cole and her husband, Tim Hughes, said they spent a year and almost $20,000 trying to adopt through "unscrupulous adoption facilitators and attorneys" only to be told that they were either too old or they had not finished grieving over their own daughter's death. Finally, Cole decided to start her own adoption agency.

After helping 32 other families find children, Cole and Hughes adopted their own daughter, Lindsay, from Russia in 1993.

Caption:

PHOTOS BY BILL KENNEDY / PLAIN DEALER PHOTOGRAPHER PHOTO 1

of European Adoption consultants holds 8-month-old Lienne Pyzik. Lienne's parents are Albert and Iris Pyzik of Granville, Ohio. The girl was born in China, whose flag, foreground, was one of several displayed at the picnic. PHOTO 2 Noelle Weisner, 1, held by her fatheer Jim, was one of the children adopted through a local adoption agency who attended a reunion picnic in North Royalton yesterday.