Brushing off the cobwebs

I realized a bit back that whining abut the evil tort system (and it IS evil) or writing about my modest biking exploits was not a good enough reason to generate blog entries. Maybe you'd like to join me for my latest adventure. It might be fun.

In September my wife journeyed to the Ukraine to help clean up orphanages: give them new paint jobs, take over new beds and matresses, stuff like that. She'd been to Eastern European orphanages before and was familiar with them, knew about the heartbreaking stories behind so many of the children, and our seeming inability to make even the slightest impact upon the kids' plights.

At one of the orphanges she instantly bonded with a child who's name we think is Anya, a cute little 11 year old girl who wanted to be loved in the worst way. Karin got a few pictures of her, and on her return showed them to me and explained about what she had seen.

"She's a sweet little thing. Sometimes I wish we could have brought her back." She knows that you can't get attached to those little ones else you'd bring them all back, which you can't do.

"Well, why don't we?" I said. "It works for me. We can't save the world, but we can help one child".

We thought of all the reasons we shouldn't do it:
--we're getting old.
--I could lose my job over one nuissance lawsuit (thank you, evil American tort system, almost the only one in the civilized world that has not adopted a "loser pays" approach so as to discourage stupid lawsuits).
--I might just decide to keel over from The Big One.
--There's no way I could retire until I get really, really old.
--And a lot of other reasons, like disrupting the family ecosystem, having another mouth to feed, child to educate (she doesn't speak any English), and woman to marry off.

Someone asked me why I'd even consider it, and I replied a bit flippantly: "We have three perfect children (well, we do), so we figured we needed one more chance to have an offspring break our hearts".

I think that's a good enough reason. So did my wife.

We contacted the local international adoption agency. "It'll cost you somewhere between $10 and $15 thousand, but it could all happen by June".

Cool. So, off we go.

Here's what we done so far:
--sent off for three personal non-family references.
--two family references.
--every single financial account we have, anywhere.
--last year's 1040.
--complete medical histories.
--proof of health insurance.
--proof of life insurance.
--family photo.
--birth certificates.
--autobiographies. This was kinda fun. I didn't realize I'd lived such a fascinating life.

This is just the first round of stuff. The hard part is coming up. I'll keep you posted.