It’s been a busy year for orchestra director Joseph Gutowski.

After months of deliberating, Gutowski and his wife decided to make their family larger.

“We’ve decided to adopt a child after having pregnancy loss. And after having our host daughter from Germany last year, we decided that we wanted to be parents,” Gutowski said.

In order to become parents, Gutowski decided to take the adoption route.

“Everybody has a different experience with adoption. First, we did a home study, where a social worker came to our house to see if it was acceptable to raise a child. After lots of paperwork, we got into an adoption agency who showed us various birth mothers,” he said.

After looking at various birth mothers, Gutowski chose a young woman from Florida. “With our case, we wanted someone with a musical background. We love music, and we’d like our child to someday be able to play an instrument or be interested in music. Also, we wanted to have a connection with the birth mom that we can share with our child.”

After the process was finalized, Gutowski and his wife decided to travel to Florida to meet the birth mother in person.

“We originally intended to go down to Florida last weekend, but with Hurricane Irma, we decided it wasn’t safe enough. Our plan is to leave Saturday morning and meet her on Sunday then fly back to St. Louis on Monday,” he said.

Fortunately, the hurricane did not negatively impact the birth mother.

“She moved farther inland to Orlando when the storm hit, and now she’s living in a hotel without power. We hope it’s safe enough to meet her. She wanted to meet us before the baby is born,”  Gutowski said.