Waiting to Start

It's like you prepare for a race for months and finally reach the starting block, and then they never shoot the gun.

We are still waiting for our documents to leave U.S. soil. They needed an extra document notarized, apostilled and sent the week before last, and then this week there were a couple updated forms that we had to re-do.

Say a prayer for us that this week will see our dossier crossing the Atlantic and successfully reaching the region's department of education.

Meanwhile, here at home we decided to make the switch to having Emma sleep on the top of the bunk bed. We had tried this 2 years ago when we first got the bed, but it was a bit too scary for her and too hard to navigate the ladder in the middle of the night for those little emergencies. :)

So I was a bit apprehensive of her reaction when I suggested 2 weeks ago that maybe it was time to sleep up there so her new sister could sleep on the lower bunk. She was pretty nervous about the idea at first and said no, but then she said that in two weeks she would do it since she'll almost be 7. Well, last night completed the two weeks and I thought she would change her mind, but she was game to give it a try. Of course she did fine and tonight she was even excited to sleep up there.

My goal is to have everything ready for our new little one, so the girls have as little change to adjust to as possible. I'm sure there will be plenty!

Isabelle and Emma have both taken to saying "I love you" in Russian to us at night. Isabelle also says it everytime she hears Jeff or I say anything in Russian or Spanish to each other. :) It is so adorable. She is so proud of her new language abilities--English and Russian!

Why Russia?

Nobody tells you when you are considering adoption, that some of the side effects are the same as a pregnancy. Ever since our agent said we should be getting our referral in the next month or two, I have lost all ability to focus on a task and find myself walking in circles around our house, forgetting what I was just about to do next! Seriously, it's as bad as an impending birth! Hopefully I'll be able to pull it together enough to get everything ready for her! (I need some of that nesting instinct to kick in! :)

Anyways, I thought I would follow up to my previous post of "How It All Began" and answer the popular question of why we are adopting from Russia.

Once Jeff and I decided we wanted to adopt a 4 year old girl, we started looking at all the adoption programs out there. A domestic adoption would have been much more affordable, but we didn't want to have a child taken away because a parent got their act together or a grandparent decided they wanted the child. One couple we knew raised a 6 week old baby till she was 6 months old, and then had her taken away and given to a grandparent. It was almost like a death for them. This wasn't the only reason we chose international adoption, but we liked the fact that in international adoption the parental rights are completely severed and as soon as the child's airplane lands on U.S. soil they are a U.S. citizen. They actually change the child's birth certificate so it has our names!

As far as the decision of which country, initially it was mostly a matter of time. At first we thought it would be neat to adopt from Colombia since that is where Jeff lived for 2 years, serving a mission for our church, and we both speak spanish, but we didn't want to wait the 2-3 years it required. Russia was more like 6-9 months, and when it came down to prayer, that it where we felt we should go.

After we decided on Russia, we did some research on the situation there, and it blew us away! We had both heard of the "Russian orphan," but we had no idea how terrible the situation was.

Here are a few of the stats we found:

About 15,000 children leave Russian orphanages each year, once they are 16 to 18 years old. Of these, 5,000 are unemployed, some 6,000 are homeless, around 3,000 resort to crime, approximately 1,500 commit suicide, and roughly half the girls are forced into prostitution.
From The CoMission for Children at Risk, 2002.

There were over 700,000 orphans in Russia in 2000. After leaving their orphanages:
50% - fall into a high-risk category
40% - become drug users
40% - commit crimes
10% - commit suicide
From Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, 2000.

Over fourty million children in the former Soviet Union are living in "genuine poverty".
From European Children's Trust, 2000.

Orphans in Russia - of whom 95 percent still have a living parent - are exposed to shocking levels of cruelty and neglect. Infants classified as disabled are segregated into "lying-down" rooms, where they are changed and fed but are bereft of stimulation and lacking in medical care.

Of a total of more than 600,000 children classified as being "without parental care", as many as one-third reside in institutions, while the rest are placed with a variety of guardians. Thousands more are temporarily quartered in various public shelters and institutions under police jurisdiction simply waiting for an available space in an orphanage.

Thousands of children are abandoned to the state at a rate of 113,000 a year for the past two years, up dramatically from 67,286 in 1992. The evidence gathered reveals several systematic disadvantages imposed on young Russian orphans, which violate their fundamental rights to survival and development, and place them in a underclass.
From Human Rights Watch, 1998.

It's easy to think of these numbers as just numbers, but these are beautiful little children of God, desperately wanting somebody to love them and make them feel special! We knew we could offer that to one, and it made us wish we could help a whole lot more than one.

How It All Began

Since I began this blog several months after we began the adoption process. I thought I would backtrack and start this record at the beginning...

One day Jeff comes home with a movie rental for the weekend. "Sorry babe, I know you weren't hot on seeing Hotel Rwanda, but I couldn't find anything else." And in fact, I didn't really want to see it. I'm basically a wimp; I'll admit it. Pretty much any drama that involves children is way too dramatic for me. :)

Well, we watched it anyway. The movie was definitely dramatic, but also heroic and inspiring. It isn't really about orphans or adoption, but near the end it did show a refugee camp with all the newly orphaned/lost children from the Rwanda massacres. This was a heart-wrencher and it made us wish we could do something to help and make a difference in the world.

Over the next couple weeks, Jeff and I realized that our eyes had been changed. All of sudden we were seeing all that we were blessed with in an entirely new light. We saw all the food, all the clothes, and our beautiful 4 bedroom home (already equipped with an extra bed!). We saw all the freedoms we enjoy, the bright hopes our children have for the future, the opportunities for education, and our faith and knowledge of a Heavenly Father who loves each of us and our brother Jesus Christ who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. We saw all the love and happiness that we have in our family, and all of a sudden it simply seemed crazy not to share it. We realized that we couldn't stop massacres or other terrible things from happening around the world, but we could make a difference in the life of one child.

Basically, it came down to this: we decided to adopt a child because we wanted to share all the happiness and love that we have in our home. We were drawn to an international program because of our joint love for culture and language, and because our hearts were touched with the need of children all over the world for loving parents and for opportunity to live a life of hope.

New Year Adoption Update

Happy New Year Everyone!

Well, after a fun-filled whirlwind trip to Utah for the holidays, we are back and I just got an update from our agent. She said her best estimate for our first trip to Russia would be the first part of March! That would put our second and final trip around April/May! That is sooner than we were expecting, so we are very excited! Of course, that is all assuming things go smoothly--which is somewhat rare in international adoption. :)

Last night Emma prayed that her new sister could sleep well and have fun tomorrow. It made me realize how unreal the adoption is to me still. I pray for her as well every day, but I think it will continue to be difficult to envision it all until we get the referral and have a name and hopefully a photo.

Meanwhile this good news has motivated Jeff and I to find the time to work on our New Year's resolution to learn some Russian. We have been using Pimmsleur Russian CDs from the library. I listen on the ipod while I run, and Jeff listens in the car during his commute. So far they have been fabulous! So if you see people jogging along talking to themselves in a strange language, or people in their cars repeating "I would like something to eat." in Russian over and over, they might just be getting ready for an adoption. :)

Best wishes for 2008!

A Golden Seal Anniversary

Today is our 11th wedding anniversary! Jeff had today off to help get ready for our trip tomorrow and get our 1st set of documents for our Russian dossier ready to mail off. Then we found out that Emma didn't have school either because of all the snow that fell this weekend. So, Jeff spent the morning playing with the kids in the snow, while I focused on the documents.

It was a huge help, but because of a couple last minute changes, this took quite a bit longer than planned, and our fabulous friend, Dawn, came to the rescue. She came over with her daughter, Emma, and watched all the kids while we raced the 45 minute drive to our adoption agency. There we were able to get the last of our documents, and then get them all notarized. The last stop was to hurry to the Secretary of State's office (before they closed) to get the 29 documents appostilled. An appostille is basically an international procedure that tells the world the notary is valid. When they appostille a document, they affix the appostille certificate to the front of the notarized document with a beautiful golden seal. At least, it was beautiful to us after so much work to get everything ready. :)

Now the paperwork is all ready and we will drop it in the mail in the morning on the way to the airport. Yeah!!!!!

What better way to celebrate our 11 years of marriage than by taking the first official step to uniting our family with our new Russian daughter!

Blog Beginnings

Wow! It is midnight on the dot and I am still up getting stuff done... But I just have to stop and post my very first blog--ever! Okay, okay, I admit it, although I can create websites, even writing straight html code if needed or linking simple databases, I have never even read a blog!

That is, until my husband and I entered the world of international adoption. :)
It was there that I discovered the fact that people opened their personal diaries for the whole world to not only view, but actually comment on!

So, I thought, this could be fun! And what better way to chronicle this life-changing event.

Well, that's all you get tonight. In a few hours I will be up to feed our 6 month old son, Alex, and then a few hours after that I will be getting the girls ready and Emma off to school.