What now?

The Russian foreign minister is calling for an immediate freeze of all US adoptions because of this sad episode. I can only imagine how upset many Russians will feel about it.

No idea yet what will come of this and how it will affect our plans.  Crucially, God does know; and he will be faithful to love us and do us good, regardless of the outcome.

Even so, it will be a long weekend.  Pray for us, and for the girls we still hope soon to meet.

We have a referral, and are heading to Russia soon!

After many months, we have received a referral from Russia to go and meet two little girls who need a family. Lots of waiting for a long time while we moved into a new home and prepared for being parents, and suddenly things are moving very, very fast!

The girls are ages four and a half and one and a half. They are at an orphanage near Krasnoyarsk, a large city in central Siberia. (As it happens, this is not very far from Irkutsk, where Linda and I spent several months way back in 1992-1993.) They have been there for nine months. We are not at liberty yet to say much more about the girls publicly until the adoption is finalized.

We are preparing to travel to Russia at the end of next week to meet them, and there's a lot of paperwork to do before we leave. Our trip will only last for seven days, of which we will get to spend about two or three days with the girls at the orphanage. We'll post what we can during our trip, depending on internet access and what the orphanage allows us to photograph/video.

We will not be bringing the girls back with us on this trip. After meeting them, we return home; and assuming all goes well, we would return to Russia two or three months from now to take custody of the girls and appear in a Russian court to formalize the adoption. After a mandatory ten-day waiting period during which we would have to stay in Russia, we would then bring them home with us after visiting the US Embassy in Moscow.

Excitement, nerves, worries about many things...and we have a lot to do in the short time remaining before our trip. Pray for us as we prepare to meet these little ones.

Relocation

Tomorrow, with the help of many friends and family, we are packing our belongings into a storage container and preparing to leave the house we've called home for over 12 years. Our hope and plan is to be moving into a larger home in Richfield that will have more space for children than our original house did.

We will miss the old house and the neighborhood, but we are glad for the chance to get a home that's better for kids: right across the street from a park, lots of play space, plenty of bedrooms and bathrooms. We are thankful for our old home, thankful for the new one, and most thankful of all for those around us who have been so helpful and generous with their time through the many hours of house-selling preparation and process. We can't wait to get re-located and have you all over once we're moved in.

Declining.

The finality of getting a letter notarized and apostilled had us a bit shook, I suppose. We had been asked to give our decision to decline the referral in writing and all officially done.

Signing our names to such a document, listing the names and dates of birth of the children you are officially saying "no" to, was heartbreaking. And so we began to wonder if we were really doing the right thing, and asked our caseworker if we might change our minds before the letter arrived.

After getting permission to rethink the matter over the weekend, it allowed us to reflect again on the reasons for our decision, and to talk and pray with friends in our small group. Last night talked for a while, and did some writing and thinking about the implications of accepting the referral now, when we would have so much to prepare and so little time in which to do it. The original reasons for our declining, and others, landed on us again and we realized this morning that this is really the best option for us right now. We have much to get done in anticipation of adopting kids, and we really need to get it done so that when we accept a referral, we can really turn our full attention where it needs to be: the kids. Moving forward now with this referral would mean we would be unable to do that, and so we're going to decline it, as hard as it is.

Thanks for your encouragement and advice. We are very grateful for you all.

Reconsidering...

After preparing our formal paperwork to formally turn down the referral, both of us were wavering, and not feeling especially settled over the issue. I went ahead and called our caseworker and explained the situation, and asked if changing our answer was even possible at this point. This morning we learned that the answer is yes, and that we would be granted the weekend to decide whether or not to travel to Russia to meet the kids. We were also told that if we made the trip to meet them, we would not in any way be obligated to move forward with adopting them if we so choose.

So we took up the agency's offer for more time to reconsider, and will revisit our decision this weekend. I had thoughts this morning about the parable of the shepherd leaving the 99 sheep, to find the one that was lost. This is the hardest decision I've ever had to make. Lord help us.

Disappointment

Hi everyone, it's Andy. Thank you all very much for your advice and for listening to us, for wanting to know how things have been progressing, and for praying for us since our last post. After three weeks, we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we should finally decline our referral, and it's very hard.

We spent our time getting as educated as we could about FASD and talking to people who have adopted children with this diagnosis, as well as going over our current house situation. The conclusion we arrived at was that we should decline the referral, and then use this time to finish getting our living situation squared away, and probably revise our dossier to state that we are interested in two children rather than two or three.

We are very disappointed, but think this is the right move for us, for a number of interlocking reasons; none of them were conclusive by themselves but taken together the collective weight of the whole led us to make this difficult choice.



1. Adopting three kids at one time, especially with one or more older children, is very difficult. This was the counsel we got from just about everyone we talked to. It's not impossible, but with additional difficulties it would have been very hard on our marriage.


2. While there wasn't conclusive proof of FASD for any one of the kids, their risk factors were so high that we would very likely have had to deal with at least one, maybe two, and perhaps all three kids having it to some extent. Raising children with this condition is very challenging, and although it can be done its a very different parenting experience than for children without it.


3. If we were to accept this referral it would have been extremely unlikely that we could have gotten our house sold and a new one purchased and prepared before taking custody of the children. This would have been quite stressful for us and would have made it just that much harder to help ourselves and the kids adjust to our new life together as a family. Our current house just doesn't have the space for what three kids and ourselves would need, and moving forward now would really put us into a time-critical situation.


So, now we go back into the queue and wait for the next referral, and trying to use our time wisely in preparing as much as we can. We are so grateful for all of you, and for the remarkable amount of information and moral support there is around Minneapolis for adoptive families in situations like ours. Everyone has been wonderful, and we take a good deal of comfort from knowing that so many people want to help us succeed in our desire to adopt. We continue to need your prayers and support as we move on from this referral, and starting waiting hopefully for the next one.

Waiting, sadly waiting.

Here’s the short version: we’re still waiting for a possible bit more information from Bethany; at this point we are probably going to turn down the referral with the three kids, unless we can get some more information about them. A longer explanation of what’s happened follows.

(Linda's comments are in blue)  In mid-April, as we learned about these kids, we were happy to learn that they were from a region right next to the region in Russia where we had spent several months in the early ‘90s and where we still have dear friends.  As we thought about their ages, we realized these kids are very similar ages to many of our friends’ kids and many of the kids in our small group.  These seemed like special added blessings.  We were excited!  Our friends and small group rejoiced with us.  A couple friends told me I glowed like an expectant mother, and a colleague of Andy's told me he looked like an expectant father.  

We began to work hard to prepare in many ways.  So much to do, so little time…yet excitedly anticipating adopting within a few months.

In mid-May we received photos of the kids.  As we spent time over the next days and weeks looking at their pictures and praying for them, our desires grew to bring them home and love them. 

We got medical information in mid-May, and we forwarded it to a team of doctors at the University of Minnesota’s International Adoption Clinic. These physicans specialize in evaluating this sort of thing and telling prospective parents what it means that the child is XXcm tall and weighs YYkg and has a head circumference of ZZcm, and a lot of other medical data that we don’t understand.

The docs said, in effect, “we’re concerned.” The photos and info suggested that one or more of the kids might have FASD—fetal alcohol spectrum disorder—and they suggested we ask for more details about the kids and also about their family history, which had not been provided. We asked our caseworker to pass these questions along to the Russian side and see what we could find out.

In our parenting class at church the next day we sat next to an adoptive mother with adopted kids with FASD.  She spoke with us at length about the challenges they face – behavioral, cognitive, social, and other lifelong challenges.  It was very sobering.  We questioned whether we could handle such a situation.  

After a couple of weeks, we were given more info that we again passed along to the IAC, and their response was not encouraging. Of particular concern was the fact that the children were taken away from their mother by a court for neglect, and that their mother and both their fathers were known to have been using alcohol. This, along with other info that the docs saw, led them to conclude that all three children were at high risk for FASD, and that unless we were ready to deal with the worst-case scenario, we should decline the referral.

Their early life experiences are heartbreaking.  Our hearts went out to them even more.  

We agonized over this for a few days.

On June 7^th we sat in church and heard a message from Matt. 11:28-30, in which Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”  God knew we were heavy burdened.

Just after noon that day, we received an e-mail from the International Adoption Clinic.  Although they could not determine for sure whether or not the kids have FASD, the likelihood is high enough that the doctor wrote, “I’d expect that all three children were exposed to alcohol use during pregnancy.”  That was very hard to read.  It was the answer we were waiting for, yet it was the answer we hoped so much not to receive.  We began grieving not adopting these kids whose faces we’ve been looking at the past three weeks and who we’ve been praying for by name.  

Eventually we decided to decline the referral, but when I called our caseworker I explained that if we could more precisely determine whether the kids in fact do or do not have FASD, we would be willing to reconsider the referral. Our caseworker agreed to try to find out if this could be accomplished, and so we are waiting to hear if there’s a way to do this.

If you want to pray for us, we’d appreciate wisdom and guidance as to how to move forward, and prayers for these three little kids. We really wanted to adopt them, and we’ve very much open to pursuing them if we are somehow able to eliminate FASD as a likely diagnosis.

Thanks for reading. We’ll post more when we find out.