Luba!

Hi All,
Sorry for the lengthy delay in updating our blog. Monday was an awful day (as Tara describes in her long entry below). Yesterday was a very busy day, with us finally getting to meet Luba for the first time. Hooray! God has been very good to us, and we were so excited to finally be able to meet Luba for real.

As some, but I think not all of you, know, we came to know of Luba several months ago. We were far along in the adoption process, with our "dossier" (official adoption application) already in Ukraine waiting for its turn to be submitted to the Ukrainian State Department for Adoption (SDA). Per established policy, and for some good reasons, the SDA does not let prospective adoptive parents know details of any particular available children until they show up for their appointment in Ukraine. Thus, for at least the first half of our adoption process, we did not have any hopes or intentions of trying to get a specific child. However, as we've gone through this adoption process, and especially once our dossier was in Ukraine and we were essentially just in the waiting mode, Tara started regularly reading the blogs of other families adopting from Ukraine, particularly those actually in Ukraine at the time. She found it very helpful and informative to read their stories and learn of their experiences. [The things she learned have proven helpful time and again during our time here, too!]

Anyhow, in reading the blogs of several other families, she started following the journey of a Christian family adopting three young boys (siblings). One day, that family posted on their blog an entry called "Best Friends". It was about a couple things, but the primary topic was that the adoptive mother had discovered who the best friend of her youngest adoptive son was: it was Luba. She was this cute, happy, and precious little girl, so touching to behold. What made the story more touching was the fact that Luba had no feet. Reading Luba's story on this blog pulled on Tara's heart greatly. [I should point out that at that point in time, we were nowhere near the point of considering adopting a child with such a condition -- but God had other plans in mind!] Tara was so touched that she sent an email to several close Christian friends asking them to pray that God would bless Luba greatly, and especially with a family of her own. She also copied me on the email, and that is how I first learned of Luba. At that first moment, it would have been out of the question for us to adopt her -- and, had the SDA first presented us with Luba at our SDA appointment, we would almost certainly have passed on her. However, God is faithful to work in our hearts to will and to act according to his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).

In the ensuing days after first learning of Luba, Tara and I prayed both together and individually that God would bless Luba and provide her with a family of her own. Meanwhile, God was working in both of our hearts to ask, "Why couldn't you adopt her?" After several days of earnestly praying for Luba, and, as a result, being brought by God to a point of being open to considering adopting Luba, I brought it up to Tara asking her if she was at all open to it. Much to my surprise, God had been working in her heart, too, and she was farther along than I was! We were both so excited that God had changed our hearts separately to bring about such a desire! Unbeknownst to me, sometime very early after discovering Luba, Tara began to think that maybe she would want to adopt her, but she thought it would be out of the question for me, and that is why she kept it to herself until I broached the subject.

At that point once we had discovered that we were both interested in adopting Luba, we contacted our adoption agency to let them know about Luba, to say that God had brought us well down the path of wanting to adopt her (but we weren't fully there yet!), and to see what steps we could take, if any, to try to adopt her specifically. We also then asked a few close, mature, respected Christian friends to pray for us about an important decision regarding us adopting a child with a medical condition we had not previously been open to. Over the course of days, God encouraged and strengthened us in our desire to adopt Luba, and we began to actively pursue adopting her.

The ensuing months proved to be been an emotional rollercoaster, mainly, I guess, because of lack of trust in God that what he had brought about in our hearts, he would also bring to fruition. There are so very many unknowns when adopting from Ukraine, and requesting a specific child is against the rules. As time progressed (back at home) and we learned more about Luba, got more pictures of her, etc., we came to love her more and more. Unfortunately, we also knew of other families who had expressed interest in her, and we had no way of knowing God's ultimate plans for us. Specifically, we knew that God had used Luba herself to bring us to where we were open to adopting a child with such special needs, but that did not mean that Luba was the child God had in mind. Likewise, the information we got from Ukraine along the way of pursuing Luba was sometimes difficult to assess or somewhat challenging to trust. We left the US a week and a half ago having been told that Luba was set aside for us to adopt, but, in my flesh, I refused to place confidence in it until I saw her personally yesterday.

That said, God has proven himself faithful yet again, and the Luba we get to adopt is the precious little girl we have fallen in love with! It was so nice yesterday for all of us to finally meet her after several months of longing! Chloe was particularly excited. Luba is a cute little girl, three and a half years old. She was very friendly and nice, giving all of us (especially Chloe) lots of hugs and kisses. [However, some of that is very likely learned behavior and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As an example, all of the kids at this orphanage have been taught to refer to any new adults as "Mama" and "Papa".] Luba also seems to be very smart, as the orphanage caretakers and doctors have repeatedly told us. She can already say "Chloe" and "Phoebe" and correctly answers "dva" (two) if we ask her how many sisters she has. In a room full of children, you can ask her where her sister Chloe is, and she will point her out to you.

For those of you who are interested, Luba's prognosis is very good. She has fully functional knees with bones projecting below them (as should be the case), which means that she can get "below-the-knee" prostheses on both legs, which are far easier to learn to use and offer greater mobility once mastered. Once everything is in order (there is still a road ahead!), Luba should be able to run, jump, and play like every other child.

Well, I guess that is enough for now. I want to make sure I can post this before we leave for the orphanage this morning. Our visiting hours are 10:00am-11:45am and 4:00pm-6:00pm every day. We don't know if we will be able to maintain that rigorous of a schedule with Phoebe and Chloe every day, but I'd like to try, especially these first few days while we try to show Luba that we are her family and are really here for her.

Oh, also about the pictures. The first one is of Masha (translator/facilitator) and Dr. Peipon during our lunch last Friday when we were waiting to hopefully meet up with the Inspector (didn't happen). Tara was very impressed with the Japanese food we got there. The second picture is of the outside of the first apartment building we stayed at here in Zaporozhye. It doesn't look pretty on the outside, but it was very nicely done inside, with a heated bathroom floor even! The remaining pictures are of us visiting Luba yesterday.

Finally, we found our favorite restaurant yesterday, an extremely good Russian restaurant that even the kids like! We like Ukrainian food so far, but this Russian food was awesome!

Josh, Tara, and family