Long before we got married Rich and I knew that adoption would be in our future. Rich and I moved to Albuquerque in August of 2010. Since I knew I would not be working right away, my "job" was to research adoption so that we could start the process of building our family. I had no idea of the emotional roller coaster that was ahead of me!
Rich and I had discussed our plans for family and where we would start. We had decided that we would start with a newborn/infant and then build from there. We knew that we wanted up to 3 children, one as young as possible and two 'older' children who deserved a loving home to call their own. I also, for as long as I can remember, knew I wanted to adopt at least one "special needs" child, specifically a deaf child. We wanted to start young so that our older children would not EVER feel as if they were not good enough for not being a baby when they came into our family. So out I searched for adoption agencies and all the details needed to make a decision of which agency to use to adopt our bouncing little bundle of joy.
Sitting in Albuquerque, no friends and no family in sight, and doing adoption research; I soon became very depressed. I was SHOCKED and HORRIFIED in what I was finding in regards to adoption expenses. Agencies were charging, as Rich says, by emotional value. Some wanted up to $60,000.00 for a newborn baby, some were charging based on income of the family and some were not posting their prices, which leads you to believe it was more than you can afford. I cried, many times, thinking that our dream of being parents was so far from our reach due to the prices agencies were charging. I thought there was no way we could afford a newborn. To stop shedding tears I would start looking at agencies/organizations that had 'older' children to see what that would be like. I found several listings (adoptuskids.org, rainbowkids.com and others) that had thousands of pictures of children and sibling groups waiting and hoping for a family to call their own. I was enraged, how on earth can these agencies charge so much when there are children at stake!? And people wonder why our foster system is busting at the seams!? It is ridiculous to say the least.
Rainbowkids.com is one site I signed up to receive their monthly newsletters from. This is a photo listing of children all over the world who have some kind, or multiple, special need. This one appealed to me because it was the only site that would filter out based on need, country, gender etc, but more importantly a site that listed Deaf/hard of hearing children. I would get their emails once a month and I would always look to see if there were any new children listed under the D/hh section, just to see and to keep that in the back of our minds when we were ready to go down that road.
Life is funny...the best laid plans always have room for changes! October 19, 2010 I opened my email and saw a picture that would change our lives. A precious blond hair little girl with the cutest lop-sided pig tails in Ukraine had just been added to their photo listing on October 18, 2010. I stared at her picture for the longest time, kept coming back to the picture and could not get her out of my mind. The name listed was 'Katerina' such a beautiful name for such a precious little soul. Don't get me wrong, there were other precious children on the photo listing but I could not stop thinking about this one in particular, it was as if she reached out of the computer screen and took hold of my heart.
Rich came home from work that day and I immediately sent him upstairs to look at the computer. He came down for dinner and I asked "Can we have her?". I think he thought I was kidding at first, after all his response was "Seriously?". We discussed it over dinner and he told me to call the next day and find out more information on her.
That next day was the day we began the process of adopting our first child. After our application was approved we were able to learn her real name, Katya (or Katia, maybe Katja...we are not sure of the spelling yet). She turned 5 years old on Thanksgiving 2010 and shares a birthday with my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Milton. We are still in the process of the MOUNDS of paper work (to be blogged about later) but are so very excited for the day we can, hopefully, call her our daughter.
If all goes according to plan and we are approved to adopt an orphan, we will be traveling in November or December and we are very much looking forward to that day when we can meet our little girl!
