The Best Christmas Ever!

By Tammi S

"This will be our last Christmas without children!" was a phrase my husband and I started saying to each other in 2003. We love the holiday season and somehow each year it came to represent another milestone in our wait to become parents. Unfortunately, we ended up saying this to each other for about five Christmas seasons before our wait finally came to a welcomed end. My husband's extended family has been blessed many times through adoption and he always desired to have both biological and adopted children. I, too, was open to adoption but really hadn't had any experience with it. After unsuccessfully trying to conceive our first child, I started to research adoption as a family-building option. It amazed me how quickly it just felt right, and how excited I became to begin the process.

During an eight month time period, we prepared ourselves. I read and read! We attended informational meetings at a couple of adoption agencies and talked with numerous people that had experience with adoption. In July of 2005, we welcomed home our niece from China, and this experience confirmed what we already knew in our hearts. God had planned for us to adopt a baby! In August of 2005, we officially submitted our application to Wide Horizons For Children and started immediately working on all of the paperwork. We decided to adopt from China for a few reasons, the main one being that our daughter would have a first cousin who was also Chinese with whom she could grow up. What a blessing that would be for both girls!

It took us approximately six months to complete all of the necessary paperwork and compile the required documents for the dossier. In March of 2006, our dossier was sent to China and the wait began. At that time we were hoping to be matched with a little girl in approximately eight to ten months.

We told everyone we knew about our plan and started preparing ourselves to become parents. We learned about Chinese culture, read up on traveling to China, and continued to research successful parenting strategies, specifically those associated with an adopted child. Every month that passed, the wait grew longer and longer and in turn more and more difficult. Our phrase changed a little bit during the Christmas seasons of '05 and '06 to more of a "Hopefully, this will be our last Christmas without children!"

In November of 2007, we were still waiting and were told by the agency that it would most likely be at least another year, at least one or two more holiday seasons, before we were matched with a baby. We were as ready as we could have been to parent and were devastated that the wait for our little girl continued to grow and become so unpredictable.

After a great deal of thought and discussion, my husband and I decided to pursue an interim adoption from Russia. Our strong desire to parent, coupled with our long term goal of adopting three children in all, led us to make this decision. It was difficult knowing that there was a strong possibility that the adoption of a baby girl from China might never come to fruition for us. Wide Horizons had recently changed their policy allowing concurrent adoption, but a lot of factors had to play out as far as time and ages of the children in order for both the Russian and Chinese adoptions to be successful.

In December of 2007, we started compiling the documents needed to adopt an infant boy from Russia. We chose Russia because there was a need for families and the program had recently resumed after being closed for regulations and policy changes. We welcomed Christmas of 2007 with a renewed excitement, hoping and praying that we would have a baby boy home with us by the following year. Having already completed a lot of the paperwork needed for China, it only took us about two months to put together the Russian dossier.

On February 1, 2008, our dossier was sent to Moscow. The expected time frame for a match was one to four months. Four months and one day later we got the call!! We had been matched with a baby boy in the Bryansk Region and needed to be in Russia in less than a week! The day of the call was just as wonderful and emotional as I had imagined it would be. In June of 2008, we made our first trip to Russia to meet our son! As many have said before us, from the moment we met our baby we knew that he was ours. On that first trip we petitioned the Russian courts to adopt our Nicholas!

We returned home a few days later filled with excitement. We had hoped to return to Russia for our court date within a few months and ultimately bring our Nicholas home. The wait between trips was not as hard as we thought it would be. We had pictures to look at and memories to relive from the first trip to see us through. Our family threw us a baby shower and we worked to prepare a nursery. What an exciting summer it was!

In October of 2008, we returned to Russia for our court hearing and were officially declared Nicholas' parents. We opted to go home for the mandatory ten day waiting period and then returned for the third and final trip to bring home our son! We landed back in the US on November 1st, 2008, with the most amazing twenty month old little boy who has changed our life forever! We have been so blessed and now understand that God truly had the perfect plan for our family. Christmas of 2008 was indeed the Best Christmas Ever as we celebrated both the birth of God's Son and the arrival of our own!