One year ago today!

What an indescribable year it has been. March 23 is our wedding anniversary. It has been six years since we were married, and exactly one year since we got "The Call." Once again, we'd like to steal an idea from the Parracks and try to provide some perspective on March 23, 2006.

Amidst all kinds of confusion about whether Russia would reaccredit our agency, and whether they would discontinue the practice of allowing two-children adoptions, we waited impatiently for the call. It had been well over a year of preparation, including psychological exams, FBI checks, fingerprintings, and three-ring binder after three ring binder of documents that we had to have notarized, then have the notaries...notarized.

At 2 p.m., we were both at work when our agency conference called us. We explained that it was our anniversary, at which point our sponsor said she had a very significant anniversary gift for us. Two little boys! It was the kind of moment so emotional, it will be a vivid memory for the rest of our lives.

After we hung up the phone, we raced to each other's sides to view the emailed pictures together. Sure enough, two very sweet little boys. One was named Ilya Alexandrovich Solomatov. He was a strapping little two year-old dude in a funny baby-blue sailor suit.

He looked like he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. "You want me to sit in this chair and look at the camera? Da. You want me to stand in front of these blocks and look at the camera? Da. You want me to do all this in a baby blue jump suit with pink girly shoes on? Da." In a second set of pictures, he was showing off his musical abilities and his engineering know-how. We were told he had a bit of a black eye from an accident earlier in the week.

Without making this an extraordinarily long entry, it is impossible to recount the full details of the week that followed. We fell in love with both boys, only to learn that one of the two was terribly ill. We made the heart-breaking decision to decline the referral, which meant saying no to both boys and facing the very real possibility that our next referral would not come for nine to twelve months, and might only be for one boy, not two.

After a year and a half of very hard work, it was devastating to be so close to our dream of a family of four, and have it slip away. There was such uncertainty surrounding the whole process, and we really wondered if our family would ever become a reality. We were caught in the middle of sweeping changes in the Russian adoption system. There had been a very public case of an American family abusing their adopted child to death, and Russia was committed to weeding out any potentially bad adoptive parents. We had already been put under the microscope, so how would we be treated now that we declined a referral?

It was not until April 10th, 2006 that we made our final decision. That day and the next were the most incredible moments of our long adoption adventure. Chapter two of this story will appear on the one year anniversary of April 11, 2006.