Our lives intertwine

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).

Mmmm. Soup.

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:

Dated January 2011

Dated December 2010

For most people, early pictures of their kids are interesting for the memories they evoke.  For us, these pictures come from before we met Elena, and they're exciting because of what they reveal that we didn't know.  For example, these new pictures were taken in a different room than the one where we had visited in April 2011.  When we wer there, Lena and her dorm-males were living in a room with small beds (see the last few pictures in this post).  But back in January, they were living in a room with cribs:

Toys, with the cribs visible to the right

What's also exciting is the connection between these pictures and the other ones we have from December 2012 and January 2011.  Take a look at the toys in this picture:

Toys

Now take a look at the background in the "referral" pictures of Elena above.  The toys on the shelves are exactly the same, so now we know where those pictures were taken.

That's pretty cool.

But wait!  That's not the coolest part; not yet; not by a long shot.

Way back in April 2011 was the first time we met Elena.  I posted about our schedule a week or so later.  Dr. Sophia accompanied us at that time; she's a pediatrician from St. Petersburg and has worked extensively with the folks in Kotlas.

If you scroll down to the end of the "baby house schedule" post, here's how it ends.

We don't see Elena again, but very early the next morning, we briefly return to the orphanage. Sophia is escorting a little boy from Kotlas to meet his new family who is waiting for him in Arkhangelsk, so we swing by to pick him up (he's actually one of Elena's dormmates). We go inside for just a few minutes, which is when we take these pictures of the inside hall and stairs.

After that, we're on the road to the airport; it's unlikely we'll return to Kotlas until we pick up Elena for real (wish us luck).

So we helped Sophia a little in escorting the other little boy to Arkhangelsk.  On the way, I took some pictures, thinking that this was a momentous time in the boy's life.  Here, for example, are Sophia and the little boy walking to the Kotlas airport.  Through those doors is a totally new life:

Sophia and Jon at the Kotlas airport

I was pretty sure the boy's parents would like to have these pictures documenting his trip; I thought we would be able to forward them through our adoption agency.  But when we got home, they didn't know who the parents were, and I didn't know how else to find the parents, and the idea kind of withered and the pictures sat on my hard drive.

But when we got the set of pictures from January 2011, and we saw the other family's son Jon, and realized that his parents had adopted him in April 2011, things clicked into place.  It was the same little boy.  That was the little boy we had travelled with from Kotlas to Arkhangelsk. 

Remember that Jon's mother had no idea we had flown with Jon on his trip out of Kotlas, let alone documented it, when she contacted us.  But now Jon's April 2011 pictures are off with his parents where they belong, because his parents contacted me in June 2012 about pictures of Elena from January 2011. 

Amazing how people's lives intertwine.

PS: anyone else adopt a child from the Kotlas orphanage who's about three now?  If so, I might have some pictures for you.