Happy Birthday

Saturday was Elena's fourth birthday.  She's old enough to be properly excited about it, the primary reasons being presents and cake.  Elena's cousin Helen, who's about the same age, also came for a visit.  It was pretty low-key, and everybody had fun.


Sticking sticky stickers - a birthday card from Grandma & Grandpa

Opening presents

Let her dance, let her dance, let her dance dance dance

We've noted before that the Kotlas baby house used a lot of songs to teach and entertain the children, and Elena still likes singing. And not just singing - dancing, too.  Moving to the music.  I imagine she's not much different than most three-almost-four-year-olds in her love of movement, but she does indeed love it.

Knowing how much Elena loves dancing, we enrolled her in a toddler's dance class this past November.  It's not a "dance" class, per se - it's more a "movement" class, where the kids practice moving their bodies and listening to the teacher's instructions.

What's more significant, though, is that Elena's attendance in class is something of a milestone for her.  Since we adopted her back in September 2011, she's been out of our sight exactly once - a half-hour experimental stay with her grandmother.  That half-hour stay went relatively smoothly, but we weren't sure how Elena would react to being "left" in a dance class, out of sight of either of her parents.

Lots of kids have separation anxiety, but it's a little different for adopted kids.  Remember that Elena has already been abandoned by her birth parents (and was rather precipitously removed from the orphanage by us), so, for her, a fear of abandonment isn't a nebulous and irrational fear - it's something she's experienced. But life goes on, and it seemed to us that participating in something fun, but short - like a dance class - would be good preparation for the longer separations of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade.

We prepared Elena as best we could-we visited the class the week previously, and explained to her exactly what was going on, and showed her where Mama would be sitting.  Elena was pretty excited about the whole thing. Still, it was not without trepidation that we took her to her first class.  Teresa dressed her in her leotard and tutu (which Elena loves, by the way), drove her to class, and watched her file in with the rest of the toddlers.  Elena looked a little nervous, but...she loved it.  Absolutely loved it.

Dance class tutu

I think she enjoyed the dancing, but she also enjoyed being around kids her age again, something she's done only occasionally over the last year.  So much so that any anxiety she might have had was quickly swept away.

That's a relief, but makes me wonder if I should have been worried in the first place.  There are things that adopted kids in general - and Elena in particular, I'm sure - struggle with more so than most kids, but I wouldn't want my own worries to hold Elena back. Something for me to chew on.

But in the meantime, let her dance, let her dance, let her dance dance dance.

Thanks to the Bobby Fuller Four for the title of this post.

Graphs and charts and leftover kids

So after the last post, I started to wonder - just how significant is the elimination of Russian-American adoption to the Russian orphanage system?  It's obviously hugely significant to the children who have already met an American family, but won't be adopted due to the suddenness of the ban.  And it's obviously hugely significant to those families.  And it's hugely significant to those particular kids that won't be adopted this year or next year or the year after that. 

But how many is that, and how does this number compare to the number of Russian orphans adopted each year by Russian families, or other non-American families?  In the Kotlas orphanage, at least as of 2008 (translation), about half of the children adopted went to non-Russian families.  That's one data point.
For another, I looked at some recent news stories on Russian-American adoption.  Unfortunately, these stories tend to be a bit thin on numbers.  Even the best of them, like this one from the New York Times, throw out a couple numbers and leave it at that.  From that article:

In 2011, about 1,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans, more than any other foreign country, but still a tiny number given that nearly 120,000 children in Russia are eligible for adoption.

American Adoption Statistics
The numbers in the Times story are correct as far as they go, but the impression they leave is somewhat misleading.  The story compares 1,000 adoptions per year to the total number of Russian orphans of all ages - comparing apples and orchards, in other words.  In addition, it turns out that the 1,000 orphans adopted in 2011 by Americans (of which Elena is one) is the lowest number since the early 1990s.  Here, courtesy of the US State Department, is a graph of Russian orphans adopted by Americans in each of the last 19 years:

Russian orphans adopted by American citizens, by year
FY 1993 - 2011, from the US State Department site.

It's rather startling to realize that adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans have already declined 75% compared to a decade ago.  The tighter restrictions imposed since c. 2006 have had a larger effect in reducing the number of Russian orphans adopted by Americans than the last turn of the spigot that completely eliminates the adoption of Russian orphans by Ameroican families.

Even accounting for the recent dropoff, 60,000 Russian orphans have been adopted by Americans since 1993 - and that's not a tiny number at all compared to 120,000.

Russian Adoption Statistics
But the other part of the puzzle is: who else is adopting Russian orphans, and how many are being adopted?  How does the "tiny number" of 1,000 stack up against that?