Around June of 2001, my wonderful aunt shared stories of her mission trips to orphanages in Eastern Europe. I looked at the pictures of her trip, including the ones of the beautiful children who so desperately needed a family. I thought "oh...how sad", and didn’t much more about it.
We began fertility treatments later that year. On the way to one of many ultrasounds, a thought came to me that I couldn't stop thinking about. I said to my husband "please promise me that if this doesn’t work, we can adopt a baby from Russia". He didn’t even flinch about this crazy idea that came out of the blue. We had never even discussed this option. His response..."OK, that sounds like a good idea".
Later that week, on the way to yet another fertility appointment, my plea changed to "PLEASE promise me we will adopt a baby from Russia even if this DOES work". Again, his reassurances continued.
After discovering our first attempt of infertility treatments was unsuccessful, I simply told the Nurse Practitioner "That’s ok....MY baby is in Russia". The Nurse Practitioner was quite surprised of my response, stating in 20 years of work in an infertility clinic, she had never seen anyone respond to "bad news" like I did. We went to an adoption agency the following week.
9 months later we were traveling to adopt our son Nikolai, who was 14 months old at the time. Interestingly, when our foreign fee was due, 2 checks unexpectedly appeared in our mailbox. They were both from the infertility clinic. The checks simply read "refund". The amount was within $10 of the amount of the foreign fee that was due later that same week.
Before we left on our trip to Russia, our plan was to try infertility treatments again. After seeing all the babies living in Nikolai's baby home, that plan seemed ridiculous. We realized God chose a different kind of creation of a family for us. Early in 2004, we sent our dossier to Russia to adopt a second child.
