Our beautiful daughter, Nadya and her adoption story. She was adopted from Russia before it became illegal to do so (adopt from Russia). PRAISE GOD we barely made it home with her. It was quite a trip and it's been quite a life. This beautiful child has grown to be a gorgeous, successful young woman in the medical field. We praise God for her every day of our lives.

Nadya was starving when we adopted her. You'll see in this video that she was also very sick. Happy, but sick. This is the story, from start to finish, including a couple of trips to Russia, trying to bring her home. The story began in January, 1999. During our final trip you will see me in men's shirts and sweat pants. We had a carryon with our luggage because we were warned to bring at least that with all of the most important and essential hygiene items. Praise God for that because some employees at the airport stole our luggage and we had nothing but the clothes on our backs for a 2week trip. We had to go shopping for some dressy clothes to wear to court and apparently Russians are tiny. It took so long to finally find our sizes. I'm 5'8" and my husband is 6'1". Average for US adults but for Russia, it was like trying to fit a giraffe into a money suit. We washed our clothes in the bath every evening and hung them to dry and my husband did have an extra shirt in his carryon so I confiscated that to have at least one more change of shirts.

We did finally get our luggage back on the last day when we asked our "handler/translator" to try to get our luggage back and offered her $100. We figured we had nothing to lose. That did the trick. They suddenly produced our luggage! (on month of work in Russia paid, at the time, on average, $15 PER M0NTH!!! And that was for a submarine engineer...our host...the house we were staying in).

For one of the cutest parts, go to 30:30... thanksgiving. Nadya wants to know about the turkey when she's around 5 years old.