October 29, 2007

Two years ago today, Sara and I were growing more and more anxious as we awaited a call from our adoption agency with a referral. Our paperwork had been submitted to Russia in May and we had pretty much given up hope of getting a referral before the end of the year. Low and behold, on my way home from work, my phone rang and it was Kids First. Previous to this call, calls from Kids First were mostly about how there had been a delay here or a delay there, or our paperwork was being submitted to a different region, or some other not exciting news. This call was much different; it was Inna calling to say we had a referral. I was driving on I-275 just over the bridge into KY, and I nearly wrecked my car I was so excited. I quickly pulled the car off the side of the road and grabbed anything I could to write down all of the details about the boy that was hopefully to become Lleyton.

The details about this little boy were a bit sketchy, we knew his weight, his length, his head size, and he had been diagnosed with every disorder you can imagine (which, for some reason, is commonplace in Russia. All of the disorders we were informed of turned out to be non-existent). No pictures were available, so we would be traveling “blind,” as they call it. But that was no problem for us, as we were more than happy to make the plunge without having a picture.

After hanging up the phone with Inna, I began my frantic attempts to get ahold of Sara. She just wouldn’t answer, not because she didn’t want to talk to me, rather it was her busiest day of the year at work. I must have called 30 times before she finally got to her phone and called me back. I was shaking with excitement as I relayed everything I knew about our little boy. He was born on December 4, 2006 in Samara, Russia. He had been in the orphanage for his entire brief life (except for a couple extended stays in a hospital). He was very small. His name was Gorsha. He had been diagnosed with many of the fictitious ailments that we had learned about in our adoption seminars.

That call began what was the busiest, most rewarding, most enjoyable, most expensive two months of our lives. We were to be on a plane to Russia sometime in the following 2 weeks (which, or course, would change at the last minute, b/c that is how Russia operates). We were to travel to meet him on the first trip, then head home, only to turn right back around to travel back for court, then head home, only to turn back around to travel back to pick up our little man and venture home with him at last.

October 29th will always be one of those days that reserves a special place in my heart, as it was the day that Sara and I’s dream of becoming parents finally became a reality. We didn’t “officially” become Lleyton’s parents until the December, but in our hearts, it happened on that unseasonable warm day in late October, 2007.