ALEXANDRA, NATASHA AND NICHOLAS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For 10 years my wife, Lillian, and I dreamed of having children. Every year we would talk about names for our future children and we had a house built with bedrooms upstairs waiting for them. One day we finally realized that we may not conceive children ourselves, and we decided to open our hearts to adoption.

 

For 1 year we called several adoption agencies. We almost gave up as it seemed too expensive, the travel requirements were too long, or we were just nervous about the agency. One day we received information on an adoption agency in Wyoming called Global Adoption Services. The owner, Joyce, answered all our questions. They seemed to try and make the adoption affordable, and we trusted Joyce. She was a strong Christian. She explained that adopting was a gift from God to both the parents and the children.

We eagerly started the paperwork process which took 6 months, due to many changes in types of documents for adopting in Russia and our INS paperwork took forever. Shortly after we finished all our paperwork we received a referral for a beautiful Russian boy named "Andrey". We would leave in early February and pick up our little boy. One week before our travel date we learned that our child was adopted by a Russian family. We were devastated. My wife and I were challenged. It was more painful then we had ever experienced pain before. But we decided to go on our trip to Russia. No one would stop us, but ourselves.

Our trip to Russia was very scary. We had never traveled to a foreign country. For the entire week that we were in Perm, Russia it seemed like all our hopes were gone. There were no children available for us to adopt. The day before we were set to return to America empty-handed one of our coordinators named Nick Volsky found a set of 8 week old twin girls that were not available to take home, but that we could request for adoption. We would have to return to Russia on a second trip after waiting a 3 month period to first allow Russian families the chance to adopt them. My wife Lillian and I entered the room with the twins all wrapped up in baby cribs. Without even talking to each other we knew that we had found our children. These beautiful little girls were handed down from Heaven and were meant to be in our family. October 2nd, 1996 our wait was over as Natasha and Alexandra stepped foot in America for the first time at Metro Airport in Detroit. It then seemed that all the work, set backs and costs were insignificant. We have been blessed with two angels, that have touched the lives of so many people. We hear quite often that it was special of us to adopt these children. We think it was special of them to change our lives forever.

In October of 1998, we returned to Russia to adopt our son Nicholas.