'Beautiful ride': Irwin family, friends celebrate adoption of two brothers

The anticipation was getting to be too much for 6-year-old Ryan Salany.

“Mommy, how many minutes?” he asked again.

Minutes turned into seconds and soon enough his long-awaited adoption hearing had arrived. At his adoptive parents’ Irwin dining room table, Ryan and his 2-year-old brother, Caleb, officially became new members of the Salany family. There was just one catch — it was done by video conference that the family of six watched on a laptop rather than in a Westmoreland County courtroom.

“It’s finally happening,” mother Lindsay Salany whispered as the judge appeared on the video.

Friends and family tuned in from afar, but there was plenty of meaning, emotion and love among Brandan and Lindsay Salany, both 32, their biological children Eli, 4, and Amelia, 6, and Ryan and Caleb.

The four children get along “extremely well,” but sometimes they fight like siblings, “which is a good thing,” Brandan Salany said, laughing.

“I love them, and I want to take care of them and raise them up and be the best father I can to them,” he said when asked during the hearing why he wanted to adopt Ryan and Caleb.

Nearly two years ago, Lindsay Salany got a phone call that two brothers — then 5 months and 4 — needed a foster home through Family Care for Children & Youth.

“All I knew about them I could fit on a Post-it note,” she said.

It didn’t take her and Brandan long to decide.

“We just knew it was right,” she said.

During the next 22 months, it was a learning experience for many, from Eli and Amelia to friends and family. Even Ryan’s kindergarten classmates at Sheridan Terrace Elementary School got a lesson in March about adoption from teacher Jalina Robosky.

“I just felt it was important to teach them about that,” she said.

The class was ecstatic to learn Ryan was being adopted.

“He was just so proud and then that opened him up to talking about it,” Robosky said.

An April adoption hearing was canceled because of courthouse restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. With the day finally here, it gives Ryan a sense of security and clarity about where he belongs, Lindsay said. They are having an open adoption with Ryan and Caleb’s biological family.

“I think it’ll be huge to make official, legal what’s been there for 700-some days,” she said. “They’re my kids. They’re my sons.”

Ryan and Caleb’s adoption day was filled with surprises — they had tacos and visits from loved ones and the day was topped off by a parade of Ryan’s classmates outside their home. Kindergarten parent Lindsey Matta planned the event, Robosky said.

Foster care and adoption are important to Lindsay and Brandan. They have gotten recertified and are keeping the option of foster care open. It’s about filling the gap for a child and being an important role model in their life, Brandan said.

“You can do that through foster care, even if it’s just a short window,” he said. “It’s something that you could do in supporting a trajectory of a life that’s going to be better because you invested into it.”

Foster care is a way to help another family be restored and provide love to a child during a tough time, Lindsay said.

“There are really precious kids who need … someone to get really, really attached to them and then help them to show what living in a family looks like,” she said.

It doesn’t always end up with an adoption like Ryan and Caleb, but sometimes it does.

“It’s a beautiful ride,” Lindsay said. “Not easy, but super beautiful.”