Their long wait for home is over

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All day, the children waited.

They swiveled in the huge chairs of a lawyer's conference room. They fidgeted on the wooden benches of the juvenile court lobby. They sat statue-still inside the cramped courtroom.

And then, within a handful of minutes, it was over. Their adoption was official. Seven siblings who share the same big brown eyes, black hair and troubled mother whose drug addiction and other problems had blown up the family six years ago, now had stability.

It took the form of a Kansas couple with Omaha roots and four children of their own, a six-bedroom house on a big lot and the promise of a rooted life.

Alicia, Louie, Chad, Unique, Heaven, Henry and Charlotte would have a future together, four doting grandparents and the blessings of a child-welfare system celebrating this rare outcome: the adoption of such a large sibling group.

"It's finally over," said Alicia Freemont-Musil, who turns 16 in October. "I don't have to wait anymore."

***

The teenager has spent about half her life waiting.

Alicia had a rocky start in the world. Her mom was a young teen when Alicia was born. On Oct. 18, 2005, Alicia's 10th birthday, authorities intervened. She recalls being summoned from her classroom at Skinner Magnet Center in northeast Omaha.

"They called me down to the office," she said. "The police came in and took my bag and (put me in) handcuffs."

Handcuffs because they weren't sure how she'd react to the news that her methamphetamine-addicted mother couldn't care for her, or her five siblings.

So she and Louie, then 6, would go to one foster home. The younger ones would be split up.

***

In March 2006, Chad, Unique and Henry landed with Lisa and Jeff Musil in Omaha. They fit right in with the couple's three children. Lisa was pregnant with their fourth at the time.

But Jeff Musil, who was stationed in South Korea, got orders to move to the Army base at Fort Riley, Kan., uprooting the family in Omaha in August.

The Musils couldn't just take the foster children across the state line. So Chad, Unique and Henry were placed in a different foster home.

Lisa Musil wrote a long letter for the children's file that detailed her routine with them. She added that she loved the kids, knew they had more siblings and would be willing to adopt all if the children ever came available.

Eventually, Chad, Unique, Henry and their siblings returned to their birth mother. The Musils figured foster care was a closed chapter.

It wasn't.

The State of Nebraska moved to terminate the birth mother's parental rights and the rights of the children's two fathers. The birth parents fought the termination, and the children were in limbo for nearly another year until the court system sided with the state.

Finally, in the fall of 2009, the Musils got a call. The siblings — who now numbered seven, with the birth of Charlotte — were available for adoption.

Lisa's heart screamed yes. She talked to Jeff, who signed off, and then to their children.

"This is going to change our lives," Lisa told them.

The Musils were among several families the state was interviewing for the adoption. But the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services decided to go with a different family.

"We were devastated," Lisa Musil said.

In January 2010, Musil emailed the social worker to see how things were going.

The social worker's response? "I was going to call you!"

The initial home hadn't worked out. Could the Musils still take the children?

Not right away. There was a slog of paperwork involving two states.

Finally, in May 2010, the Musils got to see all seven children.

Lisa hadn't seen Chad, Unique and Henry — her "roly-poly cuddlebug" — since 2006.

She felt the same rush of joy and love that washed over her in the hospital after giving birth.

"It was an immediate 'I love you,' " she said. "That mother thing kicked in and I've had it ever since."

The children were allowed to make weekend visits to the Musils in Grandview Plaza, Kan.

Then, in July 2010, the state of Nebraska started moving the siblings into the Musil home.

In November, Jeff and Lisa Musil took all 11 children to a photographer and hung the family photo in their living room as a symbol. Yes, the adoption process was slow. But this was home.

***

In the year since the seven Omaha children moved in with the four Kansas children, typical sibling dynamics have emerged.

The seven Omaha children — Alicia, 15; Louie, 11; Chad, 9; Unique, 8; Heaven, 7; Henry, 6; and Charlotte, 5 — have blended with the four kids Lisa gave birth to — Tajir, 11; Aria, 10; Zadina, 6; and Sascha, 4. They have become a family.

The four boys get along so well they all share a room. The more outgoing Omaha boys have drawn out introverted Tajir.

Louie plays football, is learning violin and appears to have captured some hearts in his fifth-grade class.

Chad, a fourth-grader, is the family peacemaker.

Henry wears a little Army uniform and will drop and give dad pushups.

Alliances shift among the girls, and so do bedroom pairings.

The Omaha bunch has settled in. Charlotte is now cool with having a younger sister. Heaven occasionally protests to Lisa that real moms wouldn't do such-and-so, to which Lisa responds that she loves her and is doing the best she can. Unique is a straight-A student and is taking dance.

Then there's Alicia. She is now a ninth-grader with a cellphone, a Facebook account and beautiful teeth sans braces. She wants to ditch her glasses for contacts and has a "kind-of" boyfriend, though the house rules are no dating until 16.

The Kansas sisters have adjusted. Aria is in fourth grade. She is a "little mommy," a headstrong force who butts heads with her new sisters sometimes about who gets to be in charge, but is responsible and helpful. Zadina is in the same first-grade class as Henry and likes to be a mother hen. Sascha missed the kindergarten cutoff age and is the only one of the 11 to stay home.

***

The whole family squeezed into a 15-passenger Ford van and drove four hours to Omaha. They had lunch at Nettie's in Bellevue. They changed into matching shirts: pink for the girls, royal blue for the boys.

First they visited their lawyer, Jay Ferguson. Then they all trooped to the courthouse, rode the cramped elevators up to the sixth floor and greeted well-wishers in the Juvenile Court lobby.

There were Lisa's parents. And Jeff's parents. A foster mother, Tyronda May, had come. So had a coterie of social workers, one bearing seven gift bags of games, socks, hair ties, toys and coloring books.

The courtroom lobby, accustomed to heartbreak, was electric with anticipation.

Ferguson, an attorney of 25 years, beamed.

"I like doing adoptions," he said, "because everyone's always happy. It's just pure joy."

The kids moved from lap to lap with grandparents eager to oblige.

May said she can't judge what brought the children to this day.

"There's people who are born to be parents," she said of the Musils, "and people who just have kids."

***

The group filed into Judge Elizabeth Crnkovich's courtroom at 2:37 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.

The first order of business was seemingly minor.

Ferguson asked the judge to amend the adoption petition to remove a hyphen errantly placed in Alicia's new name. Alicia Freemont was changing her name to Alicia Freemont Musil, no hyphen.

As the judge and lawyer flipped through their files, Alicia sat in the front row shaking her head, tears filling her eyes. Her face flushed red. She mouthed the words: No, no.

Finally, she stood up and said: "I don't want my name like that." Alicia wanted the hyphen.

The courtroom was silent.

Crnkovich rose, exited the bench and came down to the floor to speak. Were there hard feelings? Did this adoption need to wait? She looked at Alicia.

Hyphenating a name can make things complicated, the judge told Alicia.

Was she sure? Alicia was.

So Judge Crnkovich returned to her seat and swore in Alicia Freemont-Musil.

"When did life ever run smoothly?" the judge asked, moving on to a series of questions for Jeff and Lisa:

Have the children lived in your house? Have they meshed well with your family?

Are you and your husband willing to take on not only the financial responsibility of raising these children but also the moral responsibility and burden of raising these children as if they were your own?

Yes, yes, yes.

"Everybody OK with this?" the judge asked.

Yes.

"It is so ordered," she said at 2:51 p.m. "You can now go 'Hooray!'"

"I love you," Lisa told each kid.

***

The family filed out of the courtroom, rode elevators to the first floor and posed for pictures. Grandma Rhea Musil of Lexington passed out colorful crocheted prayer shawls — soft blanket-like wraps meant to comfort, warm and hug.

Soon they would leave downtown Omaha and celebrate with pizza, with cake, with 50 people. Then the four-hour drive home. Then school. Then days packed with the joys, grief, surprises, mundane predictability but, most notably now, foreverness of family life.

The children examined their shawl-blankets and wrapped themselves in the colorful yarn in the hot afternoon sun.

Their long wait was over.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com

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