A Christmas Filled With Much Joy

We are absolutely in love with the child we are hosting and plan to adopt. He is adorable, friendly, intelligent, polite, humorous and a joy to be around. My husband and I both agree that this is the best Christmas we can remember. We do not have children, so the addition of this child to our holiday season has brought us and our extended famiy much joy.

We have also received confirmation that our appointment with the Ukraine National Adoption Centerr is set for mid-January (barring any disruption from current changeover to the new ministry). We began the paperwork process on September 18th, just after deciding to host a child for Christmas. Once we determined the specific child we would be hosting we also decided we would apply to adopt him and so we were determined that when he left our home at the end of the hosting period he would know the date on which we would come to Ukraine to make him an official family member and bring him home. Due to our fabulous team (stateside paperwork specialist and Ukraine based Independent Facilitator) we will arrive in Kiev just 4 months after starting the process! In the world of International Adoption, that is unbelievably fast. However, our team is incredibly good!

The Frontier Horizon travel program (www.frontierhorizon.org), Tonya of Adption Paperwork Simplified (tmb_aps@yahoo.com) and "Team Oleg" in Ukraine (ukradoption@yahoo.com) have assisted us in finding "our son" who we know will (and already has) change our life for the better and brings us a joy previously unimaginable.

God has surely blessed us. May God Bless you and your family in this upcoming new year.

Sincerely from our home to yours,

Cynthia Rennolds and Randy Smith

The Day Before

Tomorrow Randy and my life will change. Tomorrow we meet our son.

It’s not the usual way of meeting one’s child, but it’s going to be our way. We are going to pick up Alekskey Bublichenko, soon to be Alex Rennolds Smith, at the Atlanta airport tomorrow evening at 11:40PM. Even as I write these words, he is on his way to us, having taken a train earlier today from Odessa, Ukraine to Kiev, Ukraine. In just a few short hours he will board a flight in Kiev which will stop in Vienna, Austria and then make its way to Washington, DC. After clearing customs he will take another flight from Washington to Atlanta, GA where we will pick him up and bring him home for a two week visit with us.

We “met” Alex in September 2005 and have been corresponding and conversing with him during these last 3 months. We had an English teacher work with him twice a week while we took Russian. We’re hoping he learned to speak more English than we learned to speak in Russian. Luckily, during this two week visit he will have a translator with him who will stay with us.

After he returns to Ukraine on January 3rd, we will follow a little more than a week later to travel to Ukraine to finalize the process of making him our son. Ukraine has reviewed our paperwork and approved us to visit in January 2006. With any luck we will be back in Atlanta as a family of 3 by mid-February.

The support, love and encouragement Randy and I have received from friends and family during the process of completing the paperwork to gain US and Ukraine approval has been much appreciated. It’s an arduous and emotional process filled with periods of exhilaration, excitement, doubt and fear, and your support along with answered prayers has allowed us to complete this process in record time.

We believe Alex needs us, and we know we need him. His courage astounds me. I can't imagine leaving everything I have ever known to join a family on the other side of the world. This is a courageous undertaking. To do this at 10 years old is an act of bravery born of an indomitable spirit thirsting for a better life.

The last 3 months have been filled with excitement, hope, doubt and faith. The next 3 months will be as well as we meet this boy we have committed to parent and as we seek final approval to call him ours, before a local judge in Odessa, Ukraine.

For those of you interested in our story, I have begun a blog at http://www.smithrennoldsblog.blogspot.com/ . I started the blog in October, but did not update it as I was overwhelmed with details to attend to in order to gain US approval and an invitation to Ukraine to meet with their National Adoption Center.

I hope to begin to post more often. Feel free to drop in, read a page or two and leave a comment. This blog expresses my feelings, Randy has his own viewpoint and mine shouldn’t be construed as the same as his. I do not doubt that this endeavor will be difficult at times and we will experience both heartache and joy. I am sure our life will change profoundly.

I end this with a poem that I read which touched me:

Legacy Of An Adopted Child
by Unknown Author

Once there were two women, who never knew each other
One you do not remember and one you call your mother
Two different lives, shaped to make yours one
One became your guiding star, the other became your sun
The first gave you life, and the second, showed you how to live it
The first gave you a need for love and the second was there to give it
One gave you a nationality; the other gave you a name
One gave you the seed of talent; the other gave you an aim
One gave you emotions; the other calmed your fears
One saw your first sweet smile, the other dried your tears
One gave you up; it was all that she could do
The other prayed for a child and God led her straight to you


God Bless You during this Holiday Time. May we celebrate the true meaning of Christmas every day through our love and care of one another.

Cynthia


"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
- Andre Gide, 1947 nobel prize for literature