China
Guatemala
Russia
Vietnam
Brazil
India
Where to start when you are trying to write a story about your adoption? For Janet and I (Harry), we always thought that we would have our own birth children. For years we had stopped using birth control thinking that it would happen natural sometime. After many years of nothing happening, we decided to encourage it a bit by visiting an infertility specialist. We had gone through many months of treatment, and things just weren't happening. Our doctors couldn't tell us why we were not
conceiving, but we just weren't.
During the process, Janet had seen a flyer for international adoptions, and had decided to go check it out. She was convinced that by going to this, we would never need it because it would kick start her system into getting pregnant. Well, it didn't, so we decided to pursue an international adoption. We talked to many people about several different adoption agencies, and everyone had great things to say about theirs. We decided to use FTIA because their cost seemed to be much lower than the other agencies. We couldn't have made a better decision.
We started the process of putting our dossier together in August of 2000. All the paperwork went very smoothly except for one person. We had one elected official that absolutely would not help us on one part of the paperwork that we needed filled out. (We are hoping she gets voted out of office in the next election!) But we were able to get it filled out by another official, so everything worked out fine. By this time we had told friends and family what we were doing, and everyone was getting very excited for us. Even everyone we come in contact with by preparing our dossier was extremely happy for us.
Finally we had all our paperwork finished and approvals all gathered in February, and all we had to do was wait on a referral. Now we were wanting to adopt both a boy and a girl at one time. We were told about 4 months for a boy and 6 months for a girl. In late May we received a call from FTIA and they said they had a boy for us!
We received the pictures and the medical of the little boy that day and we were so excited. He had such bright blue eyes that we instantly fell in love with him. But looking at his medical really scared us, so we really tried not to get too attached too fast. We had contacted the International Adoption Center at Children's Hospital in Cincinnati to review his medical information. Dr. Mary Staat is the person in charge and she turned out to be a wonderful person herself. She told us many of the things on his medical were there because they were standard diagnosis, and did not really concern her. She had a few questions, which FTIA quickly answered, and she pronounced him healthy! We were overjoyed. But we were still waiting on a little girl.
We received a call from FTIA on Friday, June 22nd, saying that they had a little girl for us. They said things were a little different on her as they were told she was healthy, and was between 13 and 14 months old. That was all they knew. Would we consider her? We talked about it for a while and decided that yes, we would consider her. They said, "Great! You travel next weekend." Now we were in shock, we thought we would have more time to get ready. But we got our visas and were on the plane on the 30th of June.
The trip going over was one obstacle after another. We were supposed to fly Delta from Dayton, OH to LaGuardia, shuttle to JFK, and then take Aeroflot to Moscow. LaGuardia closed a runway, canceling our flight. Delta taxied us to Cincinnati where we picked up an Air France flight to Paris, then on to Moscow. So now we were late, but not horribly so. After we made it through the visa process, we found out that our luggage did not make it to Moscow. Now we were frantic. We had brought no other clothes with us; we had never lost our luggage before. It took us three hours to fill out the lost luggage forms at the international airport. Finally we went through customs and found our ride. Natasha was our escort in Moscow, and she waited patiently for 3 hours at the airport wondering if we had made it or not. We missed our flight to Rostov, so Natasha took us to another airport where we caught a midnight flight out. We finally arrived in Rostov at 1:30 AM on July 2nd. Only about 6 hours later than we were supposed to be there! Our luggage finally showed up on Wednesday.
We got up Monday and got to go see our son. His name at the time was Alexander, but we had decided on the name Benjamin. So we kept his original name as his middle name, making him Benjamin Alexander. He looked exactly like the pictures we saw, and we knew he was the one for us. He was laughing and giggling, and really seemed to enjoy spending time with us. The hour that we got to spend with him went way too fast, and we soon had to leave. But we were able to return on Tuesday and spend another hour with him.
Wednesday, we received the referral information for the little girl, and learned that she was in a neighboring town called Taganrog. We made the hour long trip there anxiously waiting to meet our daughter. We entered the orphanage and met with the director who started giving us all the medical information. Luckily Janet works at the children's hospital here in Dayton, so she was doing a good job writing down the information. About half way through, they brought a little girl in to us. Now understand, both of us have light brown hair and light colored eyes. Ben was a blond with blue eyes. We just assumed that our daughter would be too, but here was a little girl with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. We thought that there was a mistake at first, but they assured us that yes, this was the little girl for us!
I took the little girl and started to play with her while letting Janet continue to collect the medical information. She seemed bright, alert and very full of life. After a few minutes, I could tell that she was the perfect daughter for us! After we had all the medical information, we were allowed to take her outside for a few minutes. The three of us played and had a great time. We had originally planned on naming her Emily, but we knew that Emily did not fit her. We decided to keep her Russian name, Kera. Janet was convinced she was our daughter also, but now we just needed to check out her medical information.
We called Dr. Mary Staat, and gave her all the medical information. She told us that everything looked good except the circumference of her head, it should have been bigger. She also said it seemed strange that her mom was a confirmed alcoholic. She said that she thought that Kera might have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). She would need pictures of her face and hands, plus a new measurement of her head to really tell. FAS is the leading cause of mental retardation in the United States. Although it may not show up in the first few years of a child's life, it can show up later and cause many disabilities along with social and behavioral problems.
That night was probably the hardest night of Janet's and my life. We cried a lot, we prayed a lot. We both knew that we wanted to take Kera home with us, but neither felt that we could take care of a special needs child. We were told that if we turned Kera down, that any other child that was referred to us would not be nearly as healthy. We felt that if we turned her down that we may not get a daughter. It was a very long and hard night.
The next day bright and early we headed back out to Taganrog to see Kera, armed with a tape measure and a digital camera. We took many pictures of Kera's hands and face. We watched her walking and playing with a ball, and knew that nothing should be wrong with this little girl. We tried to take a measurement of her head circumference. With Janet holding her, I took the tape measure and tried to measure. In the states, you measure over the eyebrows to the largest part of the head. The doctor in Russia would just allow me to measure from over the eyebrows straight back. Actually, her head measured 1 centimeter larger straight back, plus add a couple of centimeters for going to the largest place on the head, and she fell right into the normal range.
We got back to Rostov and emailed the photos to Dr. Staat. We then called her at her house and woke her up at 5 a.m. her time to take a look at them. The first words she said after opening the first picture was "Oh, what a doll baby!" She looked at all the pictures and heard about the head circumference and declared that she showed no signs of FAS. We were overjoyed!!! Now we had our little girl and our little boy.
We reluctantly came back to the States on Saturday, thinking that in just a couple of weeks we would be back to pick them up. Unfortunately, the judge that hears all the court cases went on vacation. Then the orphanage director of Kera's orphanage went on vacation. Finally we received a court date of Sept 14th. Unfortunately, we were scheduled to fly back over on September 11th, the day the World Trade Center was attacked. We were asked if we wanted to wait for things to calm down, or if we wanted to go as soon as possible. We decided to go as soon as possible so we could get our kids home quickly.
We received a new court date of September 27th. It was really hard to get on a plane after the events of the 11th. Plus our family and friends all were worried for us. Although they appeared to be fine on the outside, we knew that everyone was worried for us and wished us a safe trip. Fortunately this time the trip went smoothly and we were able to get to Rostov on time.
While in Rostov, we had our court date, and none of our time was waived. We would have to wait the 10 days, and then do paperwork. But it was a blessing in disguise as it allowed us to meet other couples that were on their first trip. We felt like the old experienced couple in the house as they all asked us many questions about the process. It was great answering all their questions and helping them out. Also it gave us a new perspective as one couple was adopting a little girl, and she had the possibility of health problems. They went through exactly what Janet and I had gone through with Kera, and our hearts went out to them. We knew exactly what they were feeling. Fortunately, their situation turned out as happy as ours did. But it was still hard as we got to see from the outside what we had gone through on the last trip.
We finally got to go back to Moscow with the children on October 11th. They had their medical checkup with Dr. Boris, who was wonderful. Although the kids were screaming, he was very patient with them and gave us some wonderful advice. He had told us he had been a missionary doctor for a number of years. The world needs more people like him.
Friday, October 12th we went to the American Embassy in Moscow to obtain the visas for the kids. Security had been heightened, so our Russian interpreter was not allowed to come in and help. We had learned that the Embassy was closed on Thursday, so there were many people there waiting to get their visas. We were lucky enough to get in and get our visas, as we learned later that they had closed the Embassy again after we had left.
The one thing I was really dreading was the flight coming back to the US from Moscow. From Moscow to JFK it is a 10 hour flight. I imagined everyone getting mad at us because our kids would be screaming. Before we got on the plane, we learned that there were 17 families bringing back 19 new children! This alleviated many of our anxieties because there was always someone screaming, or a parent walking the aisle trying to calm their child. And although we will never see them again, we met some great new parents on the flight.
We finally arrived back home around 10:30 PM. It had been a very long day for the children and us. But it was great to get home and see a lot of our family waiting at our house to greet the new children! Everyone was excited to see them, and the kids actually were in great spirits when we got there. That night, we had also announced that before we had gone back to Russia, we had found out that Janet was pregnant. So between the excitement of the new children, plus the fact that one more was on the way, there were many tears flowing!
We would like to take this opportunity to thank a few people:
Harry, Janet, Kera and Ben
