Two Days in Vladivostok

It has been an exciting couple of days. My internal time clock is all turned around, we are 15 hours ahead of the East Coast of the US, so most of the time we are living in tomorrow. It is 2:00 am on Tuesday as I begin to write, it is 10:55 am on Monday for most of you back home.

Sunday around noon we arrived at our hotel and immediately wanted to take a nap. As we were registering, we met another adoptive mom who is on her second trip with her son. We put in a wake up call for 4:00pm so we would wake up and be able to go back to sleep through Sunday evening. Just before 4:00 we got a call from the mom I met in the lobby inviting us down to their family suite to meet and visit. We went downstairs to meet with them and saw the family suite the hotel has for waiting families. Here in Vladivostok, the judge almost always enforces the 10 day waiting period before families may pick up documents and then go to Moscow for processing through the US embassy. They had just picked up their son a couple of days earlier and are in the 10 day wait period. The suite had two bedrooms, a walk-in closet, one and a half baths, a full kitchen, with table and chairs and a couch and chair living area. They had Baby Einstein sign language on the TV and their son about 2-1/2 has learned many of the signs. I think they picked him up Friday afternoon. He was very lovable and was clearly a perfect fit for this family. God sets the orphans in families and God never makes mistakes. Yesterday, Monday morning , we went to the Ministry of Education to receive our official referral. We were referred a 20 month old named N***. The person who was supposed to interview us with a few probing questions about why we want to adopt was on vacation and her secretary was very busy, so we signed into a book of prospective adoptive parents, said speseeba” Thank-you. Our rep Irina ran the form down the hall for a stamp and we were done. It took about 10 minutes to receive our official referral, Thank you LORD, we took this as a sign of Gods hand working through this process. Back to the hotel for a quick nap and a quick lunch of tuna fish I had brought with us.

We were picked up at 2:00pm for a 1-1/2 hour trip to the baby home in Ussyrisk where N*** lives. We were taken upstairs to a very bright room, nicely decorated, it had a piano, 3 large 8 x 10 rugs in the middle of the floor, about 30 toddler chairs and several toddler benches lined the walls. A full bay of windows lined one wall, so the room was very sunny. The room also had a puppet stage and aquarium. They must use this room for general assembly and music for the children. We took along a duffle bag full of toys and several toddler snack foods which I had packaged in plastic Easter eggs. We got on the floor, spread out about 4 toys around us and set the snacks nearby.

Our rep, Irina, went and got N*** who was all dressed up to meet us. She had on a pink taffeta and lace dress, pink tights, a beautiful sweater over the dress, bright yellow sandals, her hair had been recently cut and she was very clean. Our rep was telling her she was meeting mama and papa as she came into the room. I thought we were supposed to wait till we accepted her to tell her we are mama and papa, but she is so young and not speaking much, they must figure it is OK to do this. She stood about 6 feet away from us and was visibly shaking and scared. I rolled a ball to her and she picked it up and with coaching from Irina, she walked the ball to me. Irina said to bring her into my arms and hold her so I did, I am so used to allowing children to make the first move toward affection that this seemed foreign to me. She was shaking, but she liked being held. I held her and talked to her. I had a list of Russian words and phrases on the bench beside me, and spoke several words hoping to comfort her. The word Hello seemed to be recognized and comfort her. Irina wanted me to pass her to David, but she had just gotten a little comfortable with me and does not see men often and has never seen a beard on a man, so we let her just snuggle into my lap till she was more comfortable. David held out an open egg of snacks and she timidly took one at a time and ate them while she studied us and began to settle down, she only had one moment of almost tears when I tried to pass her to David the first time. She was trembling and as stiff as her clothes, but she liked being held. She was not interested in the toys, but was very interested in the snacks, we started with Gerber fruit puffs, then we tried the Gerber rounds, but they were too hard (bad package of product from the store, our son loved them, but they were never too hard for him), then she had the Gerber fruits, our son calls them squishy fruit. She tried gold fish but only had 3 of them before delicately taking the fourth from her mouth and handing it to me, so no more goldfish for N*** for now. Then she had a Gerber breakfast bar, I broke into pieces and put all the snacks in the plastic eggs and she picked them up one at a time and was clearly enjoying the snacks. During this hour of snacking and holding we were able to pass her to David and he kept being the snack provider so she could learn to trust him. I had put a sticker of a puppy and a sticker of a butterfly in the eggs with the snacks. She enjoyed looking at the stickers, I put the puppy on the back of my hand and the sticker of the butterfly on the back of her hand, she was enjoying studying the stickers. We began to remove and replace the stickers from hand to hand, after a couple of sticker moves, she was able to remove a sticker and put it on someone else’s hand, remove it again and stick it back on her hand. After about an hour of holding and snacking I began handing her stacking rings one at a time and she would very quickly stack them on the stacking pole, she had played this game before. We introduced toys one at a time quickly advancing from very simple toys toward much more advanced toys, testing her capabilities. The toy I had brought out she really liked was a set of gears on a plastic board that lights, the gears turn and has music when a button is pushed. She only had to be shown two times how to push the button and she was able to remove the gears, switch them around, use two hands to figure out how to push the gears into the correct placement to snap in place, she mastered this game in just a few minutes and also played with the game continuously for over ten minutes. She accidentally dumped all the gears off the game and was able to replace them all back on the game by herself. She showed us a very good attention span, and the ability to problem solve as she moved the gears around the board. She was interacting with us as she played and looked us in the eye as she interacted. She was able to recognize different things when the word was spoken, she would look towards the item that matched the word, she did squeal one or two happy words that seemed to be appropriate but in Russian, so we are not sure what she was saying. She began playing with us like she had known us forever. We began a game of saying can I have a hug in Russian, and N*** would run into my arms for a hug, then David would say can I have a hug and she would walk towards him with smiles and laughter and fall into a big hug, then she would run back to me, then walk back to David and so on. She still prefers the mama, very normal for 20 months. Irina came in to tell me some information from her social workers file, so I was distracted taking notes, but I would look over at N*** and David and they were playing and laughing and she was now fully enjoying Papa. He had brought out the stuffed animals and she was hugging the stuffed animals with great joy each time she was prompted. As our time ended, we gave N*** two stuffed animals to keep, at the end of the week we will give her most of the toys, we will keep the toys that light up and make sounds to bring back on our second trip to help her remember us as it may be four to six months before we can return for her.

We were with N*** for about 3 hours total, this is very unusual, and they usually keep the visits to around 2 hours. The assistant orphanage director and Irina were both impressed with how prepared we were to meet with N*** and test her abilities, apparently they see several parents bring one toy and expect to play two hours with one toy. Most parents going through this process are first time parents and we have experience with our son. We also have a wonderful advantage of close friends the Lord has provided who have been wonderful counsel and example about this adoption process as they have completed it two times. Thank you God and thank you Vicki and Greg.

We were very impressed with N***, we do not fear the affects ******* may have had on this child and will hear her medical from the doctor tomorrow morning. We will pay for testing for HIV and Hepatitis C from an independent lab. She has tested negative for both of these tests one time, but we would like them to be done again. We feel God has lead us to N*** and she will be our daughter, the tests are just a formality. We will have time with N*** today; we may have to bring her into Vladivostok to have the blood tests where they can do it in one day. They may also be able to get one day results in her city, we will discover this all today.

I hope you all have been touched by this telling of our journey so far. May God bless you all.

Love from the Metzgers, David II, Debbie, David III and Danielle (N***)