I’m really enjoying reminiscing about all we went through when we adopted our two girls fifteen years ago.
When I’m sharing with the LOML what I’m writing about, we both remember things we hadn’t thought about since the adoption.
Please read Part One ~ How God placed adoption on my heart
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The most difficult part of being in Kazakhstan while we met and bonded with our girls, then went to court, and waited for travel dates to return home, was being away from our four boys. I remember waking up at 3 AM for the first week (jet lag stinks!) and just sitting in the dark in the apartment and crying because my heart hurt so bad for my boys. I was so torn between wanting to be with our new daughters and wanting to be home with our boys. What an awful feeling!
We started an adoption blog when we were in Kazakhstan so we could keep in touch with the boys and our family and friends who were taking such great care of them while we were gone. I looked forward to writing every night to describe our day to the boys. That’s how they first saw pictures of their new sisters! It was a lot of fun! I think it was getting me ready to write this blog a few years later.
After meeting the two girls, we spent the next two weeks playing and bonding with them either in our apartment or at the orphanage depending on what the caretakers had planned for us. When we stayed at the orphanage, we would visit both girls for two hours in the morning, go to lunch at a nearby restaurant, then return to the orphanage to spend time separately with each girl in the afternoon. We also got to spend time with other adoptive parents. Being able to hear and speak English was refreshing after not hearing our language for so long.
We knew we wanted to change the girls’ names and keep their Russian names as their middle names. When the boys saw the pictures of each girl, they thought the names we were thinking of for each girl should be switched. They thought Jazira looked more like a Claire (after my mother) and Jenya looked more like a Ciara (after my perfume!) Funny side story ~ I had the name Ciara picked out as the possible girl name for each boy before they were born. After having four boys, I thought I would never get to use the name. YEAH!!!
After the two weeks of “bonding”, we had to tell Zulfiya (our adoption coordinator) if we wanted to adopt both girls. Once we said yes, the process moved on to all the paperwork and legal stuff. We had to wait for a court date. We prayed for the date to be as soon as possible but God had other plans. Three weeks later, we were given a court date. Which means, we were in Kazakhstan for a total of five weeks!
The night before our court appearance, Galina (our interpreter and all around life saver!) took us out to dinner at a neat restaurant where we sat outside and she prepared us for the court proceedings. She warned us about some of the questions we would be asked and some of them were pretty disturbing. Were any of our other kids sick? Would we use the adopted kids’ organs to make our “real” children healthy? WOW!! Galina is kind, funny, intelligent (speaks 4 languages), has an engineering degree, and she literally made our trip so much better than it could have been. We are so grateful that God put her in our lives during this journey!
We were very nervous about the proceedings but excited to get it over with. The whole thing was in Russian so every once in awhile Galina would whisper something to us so we weren’t completely lost. At one point, it became a very tense situation. The judge was yelling at the social worker, the lawyers were yelling at each other. Galina wouldn’t tell us what they were saying until the proceedings were over.
We found out that Jenya’s biological parents never signed over their parental rights so Jenya could not be adopted until the social worker found the parents and had them sign the forms. I believe the judge was yelling at the social worker because the paperwork should have been completed before the proceedings.
Our flight was scheduled for just a couple of hours after the court proceedings so we had to quickly bring gifts to all the caregivers (we took pictures of each girl with each caregiver, framed them, and then wrote a nice note in Russian on the back), say good bye to the girls (for now) then quickly get to the airport.
Saying good bye to the girls was tough but saying goodbye to Jenya was the most difficult. I remember walking into her room which was full of kids about the same age as Jenya, seeing her in a walker across the room, her face lighting up when she saw us, and rolling over to us at mach speed. I gave her a big kiss, not knowing if I would ever see her again, and I told her we would be back soon. I walked away from the room, turned the corner and just bawled!!
Our flight home was bittersweet. We would be able to hug our boys and sleep in our own bed but the girls were not with us. We also didn’t know if Jenya (Ciara) would be coming home with us one day.
About a week later, we received a phone call from Galina telling us that Jazira AND Jenya were our daughters!!!!!
We traveled back to Almaty, Kazakhstan two weeks later. Besides the airline losing our luggage and our driver and translator not meeting us at the airport, this trip went pretty fast. The girls were brought to us by train and we hugged them so hard! We headed home a few days later where we were welcomed home by dozens of people including their older brothers, aunt and uncle and a bunch of new friends.
I hope you enjoyed our adoption story of how we brought two beautiful little girls into their forever family. We are so blessed that God placed adoption on my heart, directed each step that lead us to our daughters, and brought them home.
Love y’all,
Linda
