A Trip of Firsts

Tomorrow we head home to Dubai and our time in the states has been hands-down, our most memorable trip yet; a trip filled with many "firsts" for our family.

It was the first trip to the ER for stitches. Andrik tripped at the splash park while carrying a water bucket and although he didn't fall but a couple inches, he was wearing his sunglasses and when he tripped, his head hit the bucket and the sunglasses busted his eyebrow wide open. The surprising thing about it, I only had to dab it twice with a towel to get it to stop bleeding and Andrik didn't even cry. He wanted to keep playing, but it was slit wide open and he ended up needing a total of 14 stitches, both internal and external to close it up.

When we weren't at the ER, we were going to the zoo, riding trains, and watching Artem tackle his first rope course. We thought he would be afraid of the height, but he did a great job and took his time to think about his moves and finished the course off with a zip line ride to the bottom.

The boys spent some time on the water fishing with cane poles and Andrik caught his first fish! Artem was an old pro at fishing having done it last year at our Moscow Reunion, which we attended again this year and I'll blog about separately, but this year it was Andrik's turn and he ended up catching several fish.

We also had Andrik's first yearly post placement visit with our social worker in Central Texas. In September it will be one year that he has been in our family and we had arranged for our social worker, (the same one we have used for the past four years since we started Artem's adoption) to come to Florida to complete our visit but after trying to contact her several times to work out the details I couldn't get a hold of her and told Randy I had a feeling I needed to leave Dubai earlier than planned and drive out to Texas with the boys and have Andrik's meeting in her office. (We later found out her adult son had passed away and she was out of the office dealing with his unexpected death) We planned for Randy to join us the first week of August (our original date home) since he couldn't take additional time off of work and we would continue on with our vacation.

My flight home with the boys was uneventful, the two day drive to Texas went great and the meeting with our social worker went really well.

Towards the end of the meeting, our social worker asked if we had considered adopting a third child. I thought she was making small talk and I told her that we actually had considered adopting another child but weren't sure which direction to take. Our international agency, Catholic Social Services of NC, had recently closed their Russia program and I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to Russia for a third time to deal with all the paperwork struggles, let alone the huge financial tab that goes along with an international adoption. We had talked about other countries but didn't feel a pull to a particular place. I explained to our social worker that we had discussed domestic adoption but knew we would have a hard time finding a birth mother that would pick us since we lived in the Middle East and already had two children and "we didn't exactly have a woman ringing our doorbell asking us to take her baby". Basically we knew we wanted one more child but didn't feel like we had a lot of options.

Then she asked me something and I'll never forget this moment for the rest of my life. She paused after hearing me explain everything and then said, "Can I show you something?" and got up from our table and retrieved some paperwork and pictures. She returned to the table and placed a few pictures in front of me and said, "We have a newborn baby girl that was born two weeks ago and we don't have a qualified family to adopt her at this time and she's currently in foster care. Would you feel comfortable talking with Randy about adopting her?"

I was in shock and stayed that way for the next couple of days. Were we really being asked to adopt this baby? How would we get her a passport in time to return to Dubai together as a family? How would we pay for this adoption? How would we fit three car seats in our car in Dubai? Our home study was expired so how would we get it updated? What would we name her? My head was spinning and I literally walked around in a fog the next couple of days.

The biggest concerns Randy and I had were purely logistical; securing the baby a passport, getting her residency visa in UAE, and scrapping together the money for the adoption. The agency uses a sliding scale based on income and it's based on GROSS income, not net and that put our agency fees alone at $41,500 and didn't include all the birth mother expenses, foster care fees, and medical costs. This adoption was going to cost us much, much more than an international adoption but it was a lot less of a paperwork headache. We were able to write a letter to the agency that they took before their board of directors requesting a reduction in fees and although it wasn't as cheap as we hoped it would be, it worked out in the end.

We also had the issue of our expired home study. A few of our documents were out of date and by Texas law the social worker had to meet with us in our home, but the good news was, our home in Central Texas that is for sale has not sold yet so legally we still had a home to meet in with our social worker. In the following week, we had our TB tests redone, had Artem and Andrik's pediatrician write a health statement on our behalf, and the best news of all...our FBI clearances that we did last year just before court for Andrik's adoption were still valid and Catholic Social Services was able to fax the clearance letters over. The paperwork was easily coming together and 16 days after our social worker asked to show me some paperwork, we had custody of a beautiful newborn girl! I still can't believe how quickly this happened. It was truly meant to be.

Our beautiful daughter, Atalie Grace, born July 13, 2011 and placed in our arms August 11, 2011.

And in continuing with our trip of "firsts" this is now our first time as a family of five.