12/17/07 - She Had Us At Hello

As you might have guessed, today we met the little girl of our dreams. She is a beautiful, wonderful little girl with a dynamite smile. My heart skipped a beat when she walked into the room.

There was absolutely nothing normal about our introduction to our Daughter. We arrived at the Regional Inspector’s office this morning and ran into a difficulty with the document which our translator was holding. The Regional Inspector did not approve and had us use another lady as our translator for our appointment. It was minor, but an earmark of how things seem to work in this region (we can’t tell you which region we are in yet:)). We then went to the Orphanage with the Regional Inspector, our Facilitator, and Regional Translator. Initially we went to the Orphanage Director’s office and all of us crammed our way in for what I thought would be a sit down to simply meet the Orphanage Director. Our daughters’s teacher (Zora) came in and gave us a full briefing on her background and performance as a student and her prognosis for progress. It was punctuated by many references to her aggressive behavior (that scared us a bit) around the other children. She was also billed as being below normal in many areas of her studies and speech development. After this question and answer session they brought Anastasia into the office. We were very, very surprised at this. We completely expected to go to a more private room to meet her and perhaps play a bit. Instead we were put under the microscope immediately and our reaction to her was gauged by everyone there. Her smile melted my heart immediately and I had to struggle to keep myself firmly planted to the plan to meet her slowly and on her terms. We also wanted Dr. Yuri’s evaluation of her before we got carried away on our tidal wave of emotions. This was a very difficult and unexpected event. We talked with her a bit via the translator and she smiled several small smiles that lit up her entire face and our universe. After too short a bit, she had to return to her class and we were left to talk to the director. The Regional Inspector and the Regional Translator left and Dr Yuri arrived. We spoke to the Director via Dr. Yuri for quite some time. It seems this Director is very suspicious of prospective parents who immediately jump in emotionally upon meeting a child. She had a very bad experience with that reaction two years ago. We went with Dr. Yuri to evaluate her. She was eating lunch so we had to wait………… Dr. Yuri spent about 45 Minutes with her and was very pleased with his experience. Donna and I are going to be visiting her every day from now until she comes home with us. Our challenge is to win not only heart (she has ours already) but also the Director’s approval. Like we said, this meeting was completely unlike what I expected….and yet it was much more than we could have ever dreamed for. Tomorrow we will go to play with her and get to know her better. The Director has given us freedom to follow her all around the orphanage and into her classrooms so that we may see her interact with the other children as well. I am so excited that I have been awake all night thinking about her. We will post more of our experience latter.


all our
best,

Donna and Michael