Glen and Yvonne Lutz adopted seven siblings together. Now, the children are grown up, and they're selling the family home.
Glen and Yvonne Lutz married later in life, and moved into a large, spacious, 2,200-square-foot house in Seattle with a whole lot of empty rooms. In 1990, they decided it was time to fill them.
Yvonne, who was 46 at the time, told Glen that she wanted to adopt a group of siblings. He agreed on one condition: no more than three.
But, after leafing through the adoption pages of their local paper, the couple found a family of children they couldn’t refuse. They were from Utah, aged from 4 to 13. And there were seven of them.
The children, who’d been traveling from foster home to foster home for years, weren’t sure if they could trust anyone else. The children were fiercely dependent on one another, and were suspicious that the Lutzes would just send them back.
“At first it was scary and kind of overwhelming,” one of the children, Brandy Lutz, now 30, told the Seattle Times. But before long, she and her siblings came to see that “we went from hell to heaven.”
Even though Yvonne is a former nun and Glen is a school principal, discipline was always an issue, and the siblings went through all sorts of challenges, including academic and psychological problems, drug addiction, and teenage pregnancies. But the Lutzes were there for them through everything.
Now, the children are all grown up, and the Lutzes have 13 grandchildren. They have all managed to push through the problems of their early years, and are working and living in the surrounding area. Finally, Glen and Yvonne are moving out of their longtime family home, leaving behind a permanent keepsake: the handprints of all nine Lutzes imprinted in concrete.
“They changed our lives and made everything worth living,” said 24-year-old Danny. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world. Mom is a saint and Dad the same.”