IT'S A GIRL WHO TOOK HER TIME, SPENT LOTS OF PARENTS' MONEY

She's a $40,000 baby five years in the making.

Cleo and Joyce Johns joke about it, but when the Jackson couple decided to become parents it took a whole lot of money and half a decade to finally see results.

And results came in a special way; the birth of a biological daughter.

Jordan Taylor Johns was born Oct. 8 at Southeast Missouri Hospital in Cape Girardeau. She weighed 6 pounds 12 ounces and measured 19 1/2 inches. And to the parents' happiness, she was healthy.

After eight years of marriage, Cleo and Joyce decided in 1990 that they wanted to pursue parenthood aggressively. They had tried to have a baby for the previous seven years but couldn't.

They went to a private adoption agency and after a mountain of paperwork and hordes of interviews, they were placed on a list with a couple dozen other couples.

"That was a joke," Cleo said. "We still haven't had a call from them, and we never took our name off the list."

Perhaps the people placing the children didn't like Cleo's ownership of Show Me Motors, a used car dealership, or his wife's career as a legal secretary, but the Johns believed they just didn't play the political game well enough for the agency.

"We saw other people getting babies left and right," Joyce said, "but they never called us."

In lieu of adoption, Cleo and Joyce decided in the spring of 1993 to try a medical procedure. They went to doctors, read magazines and talked to others about the different types of procedures that are used for couples wanting to conceive a child.

The problem for Cleo and Joyce was that sperm wasn't getting to the egg. And the medical procedure that had the most success at overcoming the dilemma was interplasmatic sperm injection.

In interplasmatic sperm injection, sperm is extracted from the testicles and injected into the eggs released by the female. The female takes a drug to encourage the release of many eggs to be fertilized in a dish with the male's sperm.

After fertilization occurs, four or five of the eggs are placed inside the female.

There was one big obstacle with the procedure for Cleo and Joyce: Doctors in Brussels, Belgium, were the only ones performing it.

But they wanted a child.

So in the fall of 1993, they flew to Europe to have the procedure.

After spending a substantial sum of money, they knew three weeks after their return that it failed.

"Besides the financial end of it," Joyce said, "emotionally you're on a roller coaster. I wonder if the medical people realized that all your hopes are with them saying those words: 'You're pregnant.'"

A year later, Cleo and Joyce got on the roller coaster once again when doctors began doing the procedure in St. Louis. But it too failed.

"I had decided that I wasn't going to go through it again," Joyce said, "but Cleo really wanted to. It's just so hard emotionally."

Cleo and Joyce did go through it again, but this time they didn't tell anyone.

All of their family and friends knew that they were having the previous two procedures. And when the results were negative, they said, it was almost like letting everyone down because they didn't get pregnant.

But knowing that the average couple goes through the procedure nine times before achieving success, Cleo and Joyce made the trip again, keeping their family and friends in the dark.

A few weeks later, Joyce received a positive pregnancy test.

"I drove over to tell Cleo," she said, "and all the way I kept saying, "Thank you, God. Thank you, God.'"

Eight months later, Jordan Taylor Johns was born.

Cleo and Joyce agree that having a baby by using the medical procedure they chose is a personal decision. But they said the only thing they regret is not trying it sooner.

"This," Joyce said holding her baby girl, "far made up for any expense. We're just so lucky to have her."