Tonya’s Winter Visit (2008/2009)

Season’s Greetings Everyone. Welcome back to the ol’ “Tonya Blog”.  Let me start with a few catch-up paragraphs to get us from last August into the present.

Tonya was with us over the past summer from the end of June to the beginning of August. After she returned to Russia, Joanne and I started the first steps of the adoption proceedings. You don’t have to take too many steps down that road before you hit your first toll gate.  Given my full-time unemployment status [sidenote: see how I turned that negative into a positive?  I'm not just unemployed, I'm FULLY unemployed!] we decided that before we lay out any non-refundable funds, we want to make sure that Tonya wanted to be adopted by us. As you may recall, she is 11 years old and the age of consent in Russia is 10. Simply put, that means that Jo and I could do everything right, file all the paperwork, pay all the fees, fly out to Russia to get her, and she could say “Nope!  Fly on home you silly Americans… a pox on your chickens!”. (At least they can’t call us ‘Capitalist Pigs’ anymore thanks to our bailout-happy politicians.) 

So Joanne was able to work some angles and get someone who knew someone who worked at Tonya’s orphanage to ask her if she wanted to be adopted by those crazy Americans.  The answer was a resounding “Maybe”.   We discussed this with the hosting agency, and they recommended that we host Tonya again for four weeks starting in mid-December.   Since we have already made our intentions clear, we are free to discuss adoption with her this time.  So, at some point after the holidays, we will find a translator and have a VERY serious discussion.

So, here we are!  We picked up Tonya at JFK airport around 6:30 Tuesday night (12/16).  We opted to drive back that night (through the snow) rather than spend a night in NYC.  We arrived home safely, around 1 AM, only to find that we STILL didn’t have electricity in our house. (We lost power the prior Thursday due to an ice storm.)   Because she had been there before, she understood that this was just a temporary setback.  The power DID come back the next night.

Anyway, Tonya is with us until mid-January, and like before, I will try to update this blog periodically to keep a record of her visit, and to reflect on some key moments, like when we first saw each other again at the airport.

Thanks for tuning in.

Papa!

First hug. Wish you could've heard the shriek of joy from Tonya!

 

Who needs electricity and indoor plumbing anyway? We've got Tonya!! (Note how exhausted she looks after a direct flight from Moscow.)