Special prayer request...

A very special prayer request, and if you can get through this without tearing up, you get extra points. It's the type of story that gets Bryan to walk into our hotel room and call it gut wrenching. So here goes. The orphanage has been under construction for some time now and you may remember that I mentioned a new wing was being built for the HIV children who were living in a deplorable building (we stopped and delivered something there and saw only the outside. It wasn't good.). Anyway, the new wing is done and today these children moved into their new building! They also have access to some very nice areas as well. Anyway, during our visitation a nurse came out with a few of these children. They stay a little longer at this orphanage if they are HIV - until 5 years old. The nurse had just 4 children out, one fairly young and 3 others between 4 and 5 years old. They were kept (by law) away from where we were, but openly watched us and Esther and we smiled and waved several times. When we went to leave we asked our coordinator about them, if we were correct in thinking that they were the HIV children that had just moved to the building. He said yes and then said that there is one girl who is very angry with him. She knows that he brings parents and she keeps asking when he will bring parents for her. He keeps telling her he hopes he will bring some soon, but sometimes she gets very angry that he has not brought them yet. He said they do not know they have HIV, though one time one of them asked what that meant. They, by law, are kept seperated from the other children and not allowed to be in contact with them. He said that the children know about America and he has often seen them playing America. they will talk to each other in a funny made up language they say is English and say that they have parents waiting for them in America and their own bed and computer. One of these children is in the process of being adopted by a couple from California and this other girl is still waiting and still asking when he will bring her parents. She is 5 and will be moving soon to the older children's orphanage school. Please pray for parents for this little girl.

Drumroll, please...

We are proud to announce that as of 11:15am, Friday, August 31st we are the official parents of Esther Anastasia Lass! We will be able to travel about October 5th after the court decree takes affect to pick her up and bring her home.
 This afternoon when we visit her she will get one of the first visits ever outside the orphanage to go and get her passport photo taken. We were able to visit her yesterday afternoon after court. It was actually warm and sunny outside so we had a very fun visit at the playground. She is beginning to try and communicate much more with us -- copying us and expecting us to copy her, etc. We introduced her to the chocolate pastries which went over very well. We added swings to the playground equipment she got to try. Definitely have a thrill seeking gene there! She'll be on roller coasters with Luke and her Dad before you know it! She freaked Bryan out by wanting to lean off the swing and stare at the ground while she as swinging.
After our visit Bryan and I walked to the river and did some site seeing. We also had a chance to find some souvenirs...we only had about a half hour, so we'll have to do a little more next trip so no one gets left out! There is about a mile loop of paths along the river and over 2 bridges that shows off most of the sites in Tver - a soviet era movie theatre and buildings along old Soviet Street, a palace where royalty (including Catherine the Great) would summer, several churches and a monastery, soviet era statues, etc. Very beautiful.
 This morning was our final court hearing. Yesterday our court was held just in the judges office which was actually very nice - it made it feel much less formal and we had been in her office before so it was not intimidating at all. Today we were in one of the courtrooms. They are very small and very informal compared to the courtrooms I have been in in the States. It was the same people as yesterday - the judge, an interpreter, the social workers, a prosecuting attorney and the orphanage doctor. Bryan answered the majority of our questions - describe me (and then my faults...would you believe that I burn rice? I mean, I DO, but still. I had to tell the judge later on that he teases me about it because I can cook very complicated things, but somehow can not do something so easy...). He had to tell about the boys and their health and discipline and many, many other questions. We both were asked if we were sure we wanted to adopt her and how we felt about her after meeting her. She asked alot about our church and services there and even how we chose her name (she seemed very pleased when Bryan told her the boys helped pick it and that they all have Bible names and Esther was a girl in the Bible who was orphan who became a queen. Bryan was the only man in the courtroom and every single woman there did the "awww" face when he said that.).
My time on the stand was much briefer than Bryan's (ha!) and very much the same (although, now that I think about it, I didn't have to tell them his faults...wait a second!). I don't think were really any surprises...we were told some examples of the questions we would be asked and our coordinator told us some people write down some notes to help them answer.
I'll be honest...we totally winged it. I think one of the hardest things was speaking through an interpreter and yet speaking TO the judge. You have to pause every few seconds to let the interpreter catch up with you...just strange to do.
 After we spoke each of the other people took their turn...the social worker gave a brief history of the child and described observing us with her and how we interacted. She apparently was very impressed with the things we brought and how we noticed what she liked and had those things along. The prosecuting attorney spoke very briefly and had no questions for us (we were later told that was very unusual, that usually she questions the parents as well).
The orphanage doctor also spoke and I think, for us, that was the most interesting. She talked about how many of the "neurological" problems that she had had before disappeared after our first visit. She said that immediately after we visited she began to eat better and sleep better, seemed more emotionally stable, to be in less distress and be more comfortable interacting with people and she said that it was as if she knew she belonged to someone and that they attributed the marked change in behavior and attitude directly to the time she spent with us.
We asked about that later, if that was something she normally says to all parents and we were told no, that that was something rather unusual for her to say. Our coordinator paused and thought for a minute and said that he had noticed it too, that the last times he had been there she had seemed very different. That was very reaffirming to hear (and about the closest I came to really tearing up!). I mean, as parents, you hope that you affect your children and that your prayers for them are being answered, but when you are half a world away to have such a clear affirmation that God is working in your home before a child even enters is very precious.
 Our court was very short (we were told to expect about 2 hours and it only about an hour and 15 min), the judge went out for, literally, a few moments, came back and read the official decree declaring that her birth parents would be removed from her birth certificate, her birthplace would become the city of Tver and that she is officially Esther Anastasia Lass. It's amazing all those months of paperwork and 2 hours later it's done! Very stress relieving! There will be a little paperwork when we return to get her Russian passport and her American visa, but all in all the next trip is nearly paperwork free! We will get translated versions of all the paperwork for court, both from our dossier and Esther's. A lot of information about her family which is great and a little unexpected for an international closed adoption, so that was a good surprise. In the future it will be amazing to have that complete of a history for her to have in black and white.
 Anyway, it's been a day already and we're only at mid-afternoon here so we are off in a few to visit Esther and bring some gifts for the orphanage. We leave early tomorrow morning for Moscow and then fly out early Sunday morning. Please pray for safe travels. :)

Visitation and preparing for court...

We spent our second day of visitation today. Bryan is out running the streets of Tver...something that makes our coordinator a little nervous. I don't think he's ever had people as independent as we are, or Bryan is, and it totally freaks him out. Anyway, I am sitting here with not much to do but wait and NOT eat the ball of chocolate dough (ok, it's some sort of chocolate pastry we discovered last time, but it's like a log of brownie dough with some sort of flavoring we haven't figured out yet (Baileys? Cherry? Real vanilla?). Anyhow, I'm not supposed to eat it. I'm supposed to share. I'll probably eat it... It was cold today, but not raining, so even though they seemed a little hesitant, we took our visitation outside. We had a both heartwarming and heartbreaking morning greeting. As we go the orphanage is getting more and more lax about us following the rules. Before we had to wait in the main waiting room - now we can just go right in and say hi and see her for a second to let them know we're here. Every time we open the door the room goes berserk. We counted 12 kids in her room (as far as I can tell they have them divided into groups of about a dozen that they live with everyday). We opened the door and sure enough the room goes crazy with toddler coming at us. They keep little wooden chairs lined up like a wall so they can't get to the door, so they all group around there and try and get your attention. Esther was on the other side of the room when we came in and she got SO excited. She came running over and elbowed a couple other kids out of her way and reached up to us as fast as she could. I picked her up over the barricade and handed her to Bryan and she got this huge grin and turned back to all the other kids clamoring on the ground with this smug little triumphant look like, "They came for ME!" Or as we are trying to teach her big brother Ben to stop saying..."Suckers!" The workers seemed very excited that she reacted so clearly to us and told us that she had been waiting all morning. They said she kept going to the door and watching it and knew we were coming. That was a really good start...just don't think about the fact that in a few days she'll wait. And we won't come. That part kind of kills a little. Focus on the next time when we walk through the door, she'll never go back. Anyway, a good day of visitation. Cold...a man, who shall remain nameless, overpacked, leaving someone else with less room for warm clothes so guess who is underdressed? It's okay, my Scandinavian blood is way better at dealing with cold than his is. ;) She played quite a bit more and was much more vocal with us this trip. Before she was more curious about things we had, this trip she's been much more curious about us - willing to play games and touch us and openly expect us to react to her. They installed new playground equipment since our last visit, so we got to teach her to go down a slide. I think she will be joining her Dad and Luke on roller coasters...she loves being thrown in the air and thought the slide and teeter-totter were about the funnest things ever. She giggled non-stop at the slide. There was the climbing the stairs and sitting down a mile away anticipation and then the actual slide and then dad helping her up when she shot off...all very funny apparently. That's definitely the most talking and noise we've heard from her...except throwing the ball. She yells "Opa!" We don't know what it means...we'll have to ask. We were also able to measure her this afternoon - she comes in solidly in a 12-18 month size at 2 1/2 years old. We ate lunch with our coordinator today so he could brief us on what court will look like tomorrow. He's not allowed into court as he works for us, but we'll have a translator appointed by the court. Tomorrow the judge will review every paper in our dossier, read them (or abbreviated versions) to the prosecutor and make sure any questions about them are answered. Our part tomorrow will be pretty small - it's more about the last two months of paperwork. Friday we will be front and center. Court will take about two hrs during which we will questioned about literally anything and everything. Prayer requests: that court the next two days will go well and we will have good and well spoken answers to the many questions (as opposed to getting flustered...)

Moscow and visitation

After about 10 min of trying to figure out how to convince the ipad it wants to have Internet in English as opposed to Russian, I think I am finally ready to blog....something. More of a process as I type on an insanely small keyboard. It's been a trip already. Our flights all went well, even JFK in New York City where we had only a 50 min layover to catch our next flight. The biggest issue was upon arrival. We had hired a car service to pick us up at the international airport in Moscow as our agency doesn't like to have families driving with the amount of cash we have to carry and unknown taxi drivers in unknown countries (you can see their point!). Anyway, what should have been very simple (get off plane, look for guy with sign), was not. 2 hours later we had finally figured out how to find wifi in the airport, contact the driver (he was in an accident enroute), found a pay phone, bought a card to use said phone and hired an airport approved taxi to take us into Moscow. Oddly enough the driver drove about 35 on the highway and flew through downtown (think downtown Denver...) doing about 65. We hit the hotel completely exhausted, took a 6 hour nap, grabbed some food in the hotel restaurant for my birthday dinner and went back to sleep. We met our coordinator, Andrey, the next morning to head to the medical center in Moscow for our medical clearances. We had 8 doctors stamps of approval we had to get - any where from infectious diseases to psychiatry to a surgeon. A little disconcerting...I don't think either one of us anticipated having to take our shirts off that many times and be prodded by someone mumbling in another language. That being said, it could have been a LOT worse. Our coordinator reluctantly left us to walk around Moscow (our independence scares him...he was really worried about us navigating the underground walkway systems) while he went to get his car (parking is crazy so he left it at home since we could easily walk to the doctor...when I say insane think 11,000,000 people.)He directed us to an awesome little steakhouse with great food and we got a few minutes to walk around and see the Kremlin and some sights. It pretty much rained the whole time, so hopefully next time we're here we'll get some more time for that. It took about 3.5 hours to drive from Moscow to Tver - really bad traffic in pouring rain. This morning we had our first visitation to the orphanage after picking up the social worker (she had to observe us again with Esther - she will testify on our behalf at court on Friday). A little different experience...I'll get back to that. Another couple had arrived just ahead of us and, since this was their first trip they get the "good" (read scary stuffed animal cave) room. It was pouring outside, so we, being committed, got to see a little more of the orphanage and to go in through the main play area to essentially the locker room for our visitation. Esther came in and responded exactly the same, which was good to see. Someone (most likely our coordinator and the workers) had worked with her on some words so she was directed to me as "mama" which was like the cutest thing ever. She seemed to recognize us, my bag and Bryan's phone which was exciting to see (even the social worker noticed it and remarked on it). We seemed to start off just about where we left off - she climbed into my lap and started singing the same little song she finally got brave and sang last time. To her brothers: her favorite thing we brought was the legos I grabbed as we went out the door. :) That was the good side. The rest kind of...was a lot to process. We were taken through the doors into the area she actually lives in. The main section of the orphanage where she lives with about 8 or 9 other children is about 4 rooms - a room full of cribs, a room with a basic nursery set up - toys, couches and little chairs - a tiny kitchen and a small locker room where each child had a wooden locker for their coat and shoes and the workers changed out of their street clothes and into uniforms. There were 2 overwhelming features of those rooms...the smell and the other children. She is definitely blessed to have her mental capabilities as sound as they appear. While there are no children with severe conditions with her, the majority clearing have some mental and emotional issues - obvious signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, etc. Extremely aggressive. One little girl had a black eye. One had the remainder of a bloody nose. Perhaps the most shocking was Esther's ear with obvious teeth marks - literally almost through her ear (and it's mostly healed so it could have pierced it...). While walking through the room one of the little boys attacked Bryan in a flying tackle and bit his leg. Several of the children made a beeline for the door every time it opened. And the smell. You really can't describe smell like that...and I know these are GOOD conditions. This is a GOOD orphanage. Our agency has a charitable foundation (you can google Kidsfirst foundation) that works closely with this orphanage (the outdoor improvements and work with their meals are all courtesy of fundraising they have done). But it is still an orphanage. The second visit of the day we found we couldn't handle staying inside again - we were assigned the locker room, private, but with a lot going on outside the door and still the one fluorescent bulb in a dark room with the smell...we asked instead if we could take her outside since the rain had stopped. A lot of improvement has happened to the outside since we left. Almost all the playground equipment is up and numerous shelters. MUCH more conducive to visiting and playing and much better smelling! (side note...to everyone who gave us things to bring over for her, we didn't bring everything (we wanted some fresh things for next time), but she loved everything! It helped so much with entertaining her. Thank you all!). We got a substantial amount of time again...maybe 5 hours today total. And I think that seeing the real conditions (as opposed to the "sterile" version they try to paint for the first trip) is important. Knowing exactly what she is coming from will help - your perspective changes when you see exactly how she spent the first two years of life. Tomorrow we have visitation again and then the next 2 days are court - apparently two sessions, each maybe 2 hours long. Meanwhile, the battery on the iPad is dying and I still smell like orphanage, so I think a shower is in order! Prayer requests: for less rain so we can visit outside instead of indoors For court on TH and FR (Wed and TH evening in the States) For Esther's health and safety

Preparations

As we have worked through what has seemed at times like an insurmountable stack of paperwork in the last few weeks, I find myself drawing more and more parallels between our physical and spiritual adoption.
I know the parallels have always been there.  As a child I loved this song that went something along the lines of:

I am adopted

I'm a special kid you see

there's room in His big kingdom

for a million kids like me

My Father owns the kingdom

He sits upon the throne

He gives me everything I need

I'm glad to just belong

I'm adopted

I'm chosen

I bear my Father's name

Just living a life of luxury

In the castle with the King

As a child it was a comforting thought.  I didn't really feel like I belonged.  I was ridiculed and bullied.  The thought that I was princess because my Father had adopted me was one that boosted my faith.  Now, looking at our pending physical adoption, the spiritual elements seem so much more tangible.  No wonder God commanded us to take care of the orphans.  We live out in our Christianity the very thing He has done for us.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the "gotcha day" that is, hopefully, coming soon.  We've been preparing.  We will have everything ready to go. A place for her already carved out in our home and in our family's minds and hearts. Her brothers pray for her.  Her life will go, in the blink of an eye, from one where she was once unwanted and in poverty and alone, to one where her every need is met.  One where she is surrounded by comfort and love and wanted.  But she has no idea.  We have the benefit of 2 years of planning and months of preparation. One day she will be carried out the only life she knows and her life will never be the same.  The kicker is, she won't know.  In fact, she will fight it.  She has no idea and no way of knowing her life is about to be infinitely better -- she will be an heir in our home, with the same rights and privileges as the other children.   Once she enters her new life, she will have to adapt and change.  Her behaviors, her language, her attitudes will all be molded to our home.  Even after she adjusts, we can expect her to fall back into old patterns and old behaviors.  Are you following the thought process here?  God knew in advance and chose us.  He pursued us. He brought us out of spiritual depravity and the orphanage of the world and adopted us. We were carried out.  He made us heirs. He gave us the rights of sons.  But we fight it.  Even though what He has planned for our lives is infinitely better than anything we could provide for ourselves or the world can provide for us, we fight it.  We think we know best. Our old nature and habits get the better of us. It is a constant process of being molded to the image of Christ and what a member of His household should be.  Is there any wonder He says, "Now go and do for others what I have done for you."?  We are a living breathing, tangible example to the world around us of what Christ has done for us.  It makes no sense.  We have 4 children, a beautiful home, a comfortable life. There is no sane reason to pursue an adoption, particularly at this time of our lives.  Let alone one that upsets our lives and turns things upside down.  But aren't we told that the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world?

As we prepare to travel this week, please pray:
*For travel mercies
*For my sister and brother here with the kids
*For our court hearings on Th and Fr (it will be Wed and Th here in the States)
*Our time with Esther, that even though she is young God will use that time to bring familiarity with us so her transition will be less traumatic on her.