Orphans great and small

Yesterday Jason and I had to travel to Elizabethtown, PA (about 2 hours away) to pick up dogs for a client. This client, named Candy, has 3 biological children, and NINE adopted children. The nine are from mostly Vietnam I think, and a few other places maybe. She runs a website for an adoption foundation. Still not exactly sure what they do, but I'll be finding out more when she comes to pick up her dogs on the 17th.

As it turned out one of the families in PA that has worked with Cathy Harris before (independent adoption helper mentioned in my first post) lives about 10 minutes from Candy, and offered to have us visit anytime to meet her 5 1/2 year old son she adopted from Ukraine 4 years ago. So since we were going out there anyway, we arranged to stop in for a bit. As soon as we got there, Genya (Ukrainian way for saying "Gene" we found out) can running out toward us with a packet of paper saying "This is about me and my picture from Ukraine!!!" He was so funny. He reminded me a little of Tristan, he had the same way of saying words with L's and R's, too. Very cute. Didn't have Tristan's inflection at the end of his sentences, though (see Volvo commercial with little girl saying "and I don't know what it IIIiiiIs"). But anyway, we sat on Audrie's couch for an hour asking occasional questions but mostly hearing the story of her adoption. Quite interesting! Most of the issues they had were related to travel and lack of food available in the middle of nights and snow storms. Genya had had giardia and some other issues, but he's fine now. He was a normal happy healthy kid.

So then we went to Candy's house to pick up the dogs. I knew she had to be wealthy because not only does she have 12 kids, she talks about the vacation house on the shore that they all go to yearly and her trips to Vietnam yearly, etc. So we are driving along their street looking for the house number 1000 when we see "Brittany's Hope Foundation" sign next to a big colonial house. I said "Oh that must be it, there's the foundation sign." So we passed it looking for a place to turn around and get back to it. As we drive we're passing a big grass field surrounded by a big fence, with nice trees and water and other things. Then we see a GIANT!!! stone house. Jason goes "WHOA! Look at that house. I wanna live THERE!" I admired it too, and noticed the mailbox as we passed. Number 1000, it said. I gasped and told Jason THAT was Candy's house. They in fact own both, and a pool house bigger than our house. Gorgeous place. So we parked next to 7 other cars and went in to look for Lorraine, who is Candy's oldest adopted daughter, 30 years old. Lorraine is watching the 4 youngest while Candy's away with the rest in Vietnam. We couldn't figure out where we should go announce ourselves, so we walked to the back where we saw two beautiful girls (one black, one Asian), waving at us happily. We met the dogs back there with them and were directed inside to a marble and granite covered kitchen where we met Lorraine. We each used a different bathroom, since we'd now been gone from home for 3 1/2 hours, and particularly liked the idea of using their bathrooms (not much different than Andy has to go to the bathroom in any place he goes to check it out). Then we left, still admiring the house ("Stone Gables" as it's called) as we drove away.

We told Lorraine how much we couldn't wait to meet Candy because since I'd talked to her before we'd decided to adopt from Ukraine. She told us how nice that was and congratulated us. I had told Candy when I first talked to her and found out about what she does that Jason and I had talked about adopting internationally before. So anyway, it will be interesting to finally meet her face to face in a couple weeks.

We mailed in our 600A form yesterday, so the next step is getting a home study done. I'll keep you updated.

Love,
Molly