It was a year ago today, 2 July 2005, that we met Nastia and Alesya for the very first time...and fell in love. On that day we drove just a hair over three hours to the Cradle of Hope offices in Silver Spring MD to begin our month-long hosting experience with two young sisters from Siberia. We didn’t know what to expect in detail, but were very excited about becoming parents...even if it was only for a month should things “not work out”. For those of you who a regular readers of our BLOG, you know that we just passed our seven month mark since the adoption of the same two girls. My how time flies!!
The year has been filled with a lot of activity, emotion, testing, learning and growing...for all of us. While they are sisters, each girl is very different in her needs and fears. Alison and I are also very different people, but have been gradually slipping into a new model that accommodates family life yet is beginning to allow us to have a little bit of time to pursue individual endeavors again, even if only for a few minutes at a time. And, as you may know, we’re working on moving forward on a major home addition that will greatly benefit all of us over time.
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While we celebrate this first anniversary of meeting, we also hold great sadness upon learning that 20 children from the same region of Russia our girls came from will be missing out on the summer hosting program that starts next weekend. An official in that region decided to disallow their travel because of concerns by a top regional prosecutor (similar to a state attorney general) that the hosting program was “purely to facilitate adoption” and therefore, illegal. Our hearts go out to the 20 or so families that were expecting to meet these children in only a week...after making many preparations for housing, clothing, activities and so forth.
One of the children affected by this is a friend of our girls and of Zhenia, the boy who was adopted by another family the same day we went to court for Nastia and Alesya. This sweet, little boy was unable to come to America last summer because there was no family available to host him. This year, through the active advocation of Zhenia’s parents, Heather and Rick, a family was found to host this boy. (We happen to know them as they live near here and were in our original failed hosting program from early 2005) We hope that the family will continue to pursue this boy through the normal adoption procedures and bring him home to be near his friends who are already in America.