The Children of Vladivostok

I realize that I forgot to mention that the books/album we are taking over with us to Vlad arrived. Actually they arrived the same day we got the first pictures of the Little Guy emailed to us. We are really happy with how the books turned out. The concept was to show children from Vlad before they were adopted and a picture of the child currently. The pictures really do say a lot. The darkness, lack of emotions, and hollowness in their eyes in the before pictures stand out. In the current pictures you can see a sparkle and a depth behind the eyes. It really is amazing. There are 50 children represented in book. We will be writing personal messages in each one and delivering them to the baby home directors, the Minister of Education, and to our agency representatives. The children sitting in the orphanages now, need all of us to shed as much positive light on adoption as we possibly can. The negative press is only making the process harder and harder. I shudder to think of the changes that may be coming to the international adoptions in Russia. I had mentioned before, that I would love to share the album with all of you, but it just isn’t something I can do on a blog. For future adopting families in Vladivostok, we hope you will be able to flip through it during your stay at the Vlad Inn. I will share one photo however. The way the book is set up, there is a hard cover with a window in the middle of it for a picture. I had actually planned to just type in the title of the book in that section. Well, the program wouldn’t accept text. I had to insert a picture. I didn’t want to put any one specific child on the cover so I used the picture below. There is something about this picture that is very symbolic to me. This is Blake and his group mate Victoria looking out the fence in Artem during one of our visits. Blake and Victoria were adopted just one day apart in April 2009.