One nice thing about having a blog is that the posts in it are accessible to other folk, and if you're interested in the particularly narrow subject of adopting from the Kotlas orphanage, it's easy to stumble on our blog (Google "Kotlas baby house" to see what I mean).
I had an email conversation with a woman who stumbled across our blog in just such a way. They adopted their son, Jon, in April 2011. More excitingly, Jon was one of Elena's dorm-mates; most excitingly, she had pictures from January 2011 of the group of kids eating lunch, pictures which included Elena. Here are a couple (I've cropped out the rest of the kids out of respect for their privacy).
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| Mmmm. Soup. |
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I showed this to Elena.
Her comment was, "dirty baby Lena." |
We don't have many pictures of Elena from before we actually met her in April 2011; the three or four sent with our referral are all we have (see
this post; the very first one on our blog). Here are two of them from the referral:
