Trip 2!

Our second trip has been scheduled!  We will travel to Moscow again on September 12th and return home on the 19th.  We still spend several days visiting Nik and then go to court on September 18th to finalize the adoption! Wow! 

I am amazed again at how God has continued to faithfully open the necessary doors for the adoption to proceed.  I was pretty anxious because we have been continuing to wait to receive our FBI documents: our final set of paperwork we need for our court hearing.  We have received a lot of run- around from the FBI on the phone as to why it is taking so long, and our agency had told us last week that they were absolutely necessary for us to go to court.  Today, we found out that they are in the mail on the way to us! 

We will keep the blog posted as we travel. After this trip, we will come home for 30 days and then return with Maddie and Dylan to pick up Nik!

Back to Waiting...

I cannot believe it has been a week since we left Moscow to head home.  Arriving home was bitter-sweet.  I was very excited to get home and see Maddie and Dylan and enjoy our last couple of weeks of summer before school starts.  At the same time, I find myself constantly thinking about Nik, missing him, and anticipating our life together as a family of 5.  Brent and I are absolutely in love with him.  I have waited through 9 months (well, 8 months and 1 week, since both of my kids were born early) of pregnancy twice waiting for a child to join my home, but this does not compare.  I have heard my little boy laugh, listened to him try to communicate with us, played with him, and heard him scream "Mama" for me as I had to leave.  It is very difficult  having to wait to bring him home!  But, I am trusting in God to take care of him and comfort his (and my) heart until we can be together as a family. 

This week, we have worked hard to finish up the last (I hope!) of our paperwork for our court hearing.  This week has been full of doctor's appointments for physicals for all 4 of us, putting together photo albums for the judge to look at in our court hearing, and other last minute documents.  We are waiting for the FBI to clear our background check and they are not moving fast enough for this waiting mama.  According to our agency, we should know the date of our court hearing in the next week  or  so and then will be able to start making travel plans for trip #2.  I am excited to see Nik but already dreading having to say "goodbye" again!  I cannot wait for trip #3 when we bring him home! 

Thanks for all the love and support.  For those praying for us, our specific request now is that we get our FBI background check back ASAP so that does not cause a delay in the court hearing.  Also, please pray that Nik will be well cared for and will not be too confused by us coming in and out of his life while we wait to bring him home for good. 

Dasvyidanya, Nikita

Our last visit with Nikita was this morning.  The visit was a bit more low key than our others.  He was less interested in the toys and just happy to sit in Ann-Marie's lap to play.  He was more talkative today, and was really doing well repeating words in English.

It has become clear that Nikita is a very special boy.  We continue to get a sense that he is very special to the orphanage staff.  It is now coming into focus the unusual lengths that many people have taken in order to make sure that he has a home.  The director of the orphanage spoke with me (Brent) for quite a while about her desire to come to Dallas next year.  She asked if she could come and visit Nikita at our home.  It was an amazing feeling to know that she cared so much for Nikita and felt so comfortable with us to ask to come and visit (especially since she knows about as much English as I do Russian)!

It was difficult to leave Nikita, knowing that it will be more than a month before we will return.  He now clearly looks forward to seeing us.  When we arrived today, you could see him light up and look at his caretaker pointing at us while patting his chest, his body language screaming "Look, they are coming for me!"  At the end of our visit, our driver, Vitaliy, tried to explain to him that it would be a while before we could see him again.  He just shook his and said "Nyet."  He was not OK with waiting a while.  He held tightly as we walked him to his quarters.  As we handed him to his caretaker and turned to walk away, his cries of "MaMa, MaMa" echoed down the hall.  As tears welled up in Ann-Marie's eyes, the orphanage director put reassuring arms around Ann-Marie and told us not to worry that he would be home before Christmas.

This whole experience has been so taxing.  Away from Maddie and Dylan, away from our familiar surroundings, unable to just take Nik and go home and be together as a family.  The unnerving drive back to the hotel just punctuated our discomfort with heat, traffic, choking diesel fumes, and nothing in view to orient us.  Our disorientation got even worse when the police stopped us on the way back to the hotel and pulled our driver into the nearby police station with us just sitting in the back seat wondering what is going on.  Vitaliy emerged from the station 5 minutes later.  "Just checking" was the only explanation offered.  This place, and this process, requires depths of patience and flexibility that is exhausting. 

Please pray for our whole family as we try to finish well.  Less than 3 months to go...

Photos and Day 3!

Yesterday afternoon, we had a tour of the city with a tour guide from our adoption agency.We tried to take it all in so we can share photos and memories with Nik as he gets older.

This morning, we had another great visit with Nik. He was very, very excited to see us when we arrived and immediately started hugging me and didn't want to let go. We played with him for a couple of hours and had a lot of fun with him. We seem to be getting into a groove of communicating with him, so I am a little less intimidated about figuring that out when we bring him home. This afternoon, we spend a couple of hours in an attorney's office signing a lot of papers that we didn't understand very well, so they can file a petition in the court to officially adopt him! We were told we will know our court date in about 2 weeks and it should be before the end of September. Tomorrow morning will be our last visit with Nik before we head home. He was very upset when we left him today, so I am anticipating tomorrow being a little (okay, a lot) rough. We appreciate your prayers for us, but especially for him as we leave him for the next month or six weeks.

Below are photos from our tour of Moscow and from our visit today!


Brent and I at St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. This was built to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon by Russia and is one of the few cathedrals to survive the Soviet era.



Photo in front of the Kremlin, also at Red Square.  The wall was the original wall to the city and dates to the 1400's.  Currently, government offices and the president's office are at the Kremlin.

This is the Cathedral of Christ our Savior.  It originally took 44 years to be built but was destroyed by Stalin. He built a swimming pool in its place.  In the 1990's it was rebuilt in 2 years by workers working 24 hours a day in shifts.  We went inside and it is very ornate and beautiful. 

This is a photo of a gate at a famous nunnery in Moscow. In times of the Tsar's, infertile wives were sent there to be nuns.  During the soviet era, it was used for different purposes but it is now a nunnery again.  There is a very large cemetery there with many famous Russians including Boris Yeltsin and Stalin's second wife and various writers and actors. 

Nik loves the flowers around the orphanage.

Playing with Nik on the outdoor play equipment.

Brent is getting Nik started on technology with my iphone.
He quickly figured out how to scroll through photos and enjoyed
a video of Maddie and Dylan.

So sweet!  Nik loves hugs. 

Nik thought it was VERY funny to put my sunglasses on me
upside down. Shortly thereafter, he broke them.  It was a
small price to pay for the fun!

Day 2 with Nik

(Ann-Marie writing this time...)  Today was our second day with Nik. We spent the morning with him.  Apparently, there is much less traffic here at 8am than 12 noon when we went to the orphanage yesterday.  So, we were able to get to the orphanage in about 45 minutes instead of 3 hours.  That was nice. 

Nik was happy to see us, and especially seemed comfortable with me. (He likes Brent a lot too, but has been around all women in the orphanage).  He grabbed my hand after met up with him and didn't want to let go!  Towards the end of our visit, he let Brent hold his other hand.  The orphanage had a visitor/volunteer there this morning doing a "show" with bubbles.  The kids seemed to have fun with it. Nik wanted to sit in my lap the whole time.  It was neat for Brent and I to see that the orphanage workers do really seem to care for and love the kids that are there.  When we left, Nik got pretty upset. He cried a lot and didn't want to go with the orphanage worker to eat lunch.  He finally gave us both a big hug. We told him we would see him tomorrow. We still have 2 more visits with him. I'm not sure what we will say when we leave to come home. That is going to be hard.

In our time here, we have discovered that Nik loves cars and airplanes, thinks its very silly if you knock down a tower of bricks, likes to laugh, loves teddy grahams (and seems to like to eat in general), and likes to kill ants and spiders.  I think he will fit in well with our family and can't wait for the kids to meet him! 

I do have to say that this entire process is not for the faint of heart. Its been a long journey to even get to the point of meeting Nik and I  have been more emotional than I expected to be since we have gotten here.  I miss Maddie and Dylan a lot and feel conflicted spending time on the other side of the world with our other child while they are at home.  In addition, it feels someone "unnatural" to interact with Nik at the orphanage.  I feel like we can connect with him very well, but its hard not getting to know him on our "own terms" (ie, in our own house, in our own town, with our entire family present).  Its also very difficult to see him upset as we leave him at the end of the day, especially knowing we have to leave him for an extended period 2 times before we can bring him home for good. Plus, I have jet lag and insomnia, so I'm exhausted, which I'm sure is playing into the emotions of everything. 

God has been so faithful in reassuring me and Brent in many different ways over the last 2 days that Nik is our son.  We are excited to continue connecting with him over the next couple of days.  We appreciate your prayers in all of this... for peace for us, for understanding for him, and for God to prepare us for all that we still have ahead of us. 

I'm attaching below a picture of me and Nik from today.  We aren't going to post his face online until he is officially "ours" but you can see him walking holding my hand.  He very much loves the hat he is wearing, even though its too small for him! :) He doesnt want to take it off! the people in the background are our driver and the orphanage director.

Technical Difficulties Solved...

We are waiting to get official permission to publish pictures of Nik online, but here are a couple of pictures of the orphanage.  The top photo is the orphanage and the bottom photo is one of the outdoor play areas... the painted animals are some of the ones that Nik had fun showing us. 

The Meeting

"The Meeting" finally happened today.  After years of paperwork and prayers and hours in airplanes and automobiles, we finally met Nikita today.  As expected, Nikita shed a few tears at being walked outside to meet his new MaMa and PaPa who don't even speak Russian!  He proved to be very resilient and after some coaxing with graham crackers started to open up and was soon eager to give us a Russian lesson.  He methodically walked around the playground pointing at painted animals on the pavement, saying their names and what sounds they make.  We introduced him to the 'mishka' (teddy bear) that Maddie and Dylan made for him, and showed him lots of pictures of his mishka at our house, with us, the kids, the dog, and in his bed.  He liked looking at the pictures, but was hesitant to hold onto the bear itself.  That hesitancy did not hold true for the Matchbox car that we left with him.  We played with him quite a bit longer than we anticipated and he seemed to like playing with us.  I (Brent) think that he will be glad to see us back in the morning.

Getting to "The Meeting" proved to be quite a bit more complicated than we anticipated.  We spent about 5 hours in the car round trip between going to the education minister's office (to get our official referral and permission to meet Nikita) and the orphanage which is located in a suburban area just outside Moscow.  I didn't think Ann-Marie was going to make it (car sickness) when we got stuck on a small stretch of road for an hour (at one point it took us 20 minutes to go just 500 meters).  The traffic here is unbelievable.  Our interpreter said that her husband has a 3 hour commute every day...each way!  While we are excited to see Nikita in the morning, we are not excited about the commute!

After the meeting we told them that we wanted to proceed with the adoption and had them work up the documents to file with the court.  We officially registered his name as Peter Nikita Bowen, and we plan to call him "Nik" for short.  We want to post some pictures, but are having technical issues, so you'll just have to wait!