Where did this all start?

That is a good question. I guess you have to start back about ten years ago. We had been married for almost five years and had been trying to have kids for almost as long. Teri got the idea that we should adpot a child from China. We could get a little baby girl who would never know anyone else as their parents. We started along going to a meeting at St. Anthoneys church in Nanuet of people who have adopted from China and it seemed like a fit. We went forward and were doing the home study when we realized we were living in a one bedroom house and we would have to upgrade the house to proceed with the adoption.
We had plans drawn up to put a second story on the house and add two bathrooms and three bedrooms. The cost of the house was $100,000.00, the improvements were going to run $175,000.00. Total cost and morgage was to be $ 275,000.00. In 1994 we had bought one of the last houses that sold around the $100,000.00 level, but we thought that spending almost $300,000.00 in an area of houses that were typically valued at $200,000.00 was not a very good idea. Looking back through twenty-twenty hind site and seeing the values of houses in the area having topped out at over $600,000.00 and then fall back some these last few years the house we were planning would of been a good value.
We sold the house in Nyack at a little past the top of the market in 2004 and bought a House in Congers that had three bedrooms and one bath and is old (1895) which I love and my wife is getting tired of, its on a big lot for this day and age and is perfect for raising kids. But I was now closing in on fifty and had long ago decided that I would be Uncle Joe for the rest of my life. It was a pretty cool job too. I got to rile the kid up, feed them sugar go crazy with them and then send them home. I got to be that big kid who never grew up.
One day in 2008, my wife says to me "Iv'e been reading about this Bridge of Hope program and you get to host visiting Russian orphans for a month in the summer and then you have the option to adopt them." I didn't want to adopt or host, but I also wanted to give my wife something she wanted and I also thought that I could stop it later or even better she would lose interest.
So I said "If you want to." She took her usual position, the lead and went forward with it, doing all the paperwork finding out where and when we were supposed to meet the local branch.
The local people lived in Yorktown over in Westchester. They had us meet in this very nice house on a Thursday night in February I think. the two women running the meeting were Liz and Terry,both had adopted from Russia and wanted to help others do the same. About Forty people attended the meeting. They gave us the general outline of the requirements for hosting and for later adopting our 'camper'. I still wasn't on board with the program.
We got the paperwork and again Teri took the lead and filled it out got all the information needed and dragged me to where ever it was we needed to go to finish the paperwork before the deadline of sometime in April, it was an amazing feat.
I remember the day I finally came on board. It was a phone call from our social worker. Rene, our first of at least three and the best. She called me because she could not get hold of Teri on any of her lines and the call was important. We had the rare chance to pick between a pair of sisters and a ten year old boy and they wanted to find out which one or ones we wanted.
The reason for the choice was one of the sisters was listed as mentally retared. We had been warned that alot of the physical and mental problems listed on the reports about the orphans was made up to allow foreigner to adopt, Russians are not eager to let nonrussians raise their kids, as a nut case I was to meet later in the summer would say, 'How could you possiblely ever know how to raise a russian child not being a russian.' and this nut case lived in America, god help us all. Rene was giving us a choice, but not really. We got the pluses and minuses of the two children and we were told we had to make a choice. Teri wanted a girl and here we were being presented with a pair. As Rene gave me the information I felt the hand of god on my shoulder for only the second time in my life, not that it hadn't been there before. Suddenly they weren't this abstract concept, they had become flesh and blood people and I suddenly wanted to become a part of this adventure. I got all the information from Rene through a cell phone connection that wanted to break from bad reception. I then called Teri and I would like to say got through to her but I didn't. I had to leave her a message to call me back and when she did I gave her the good news. She was scared about the mental retardation issue because she said she would not be able to deal with it. I kept reminding her that she had wanted girls and here we were being presented with two, take a chance. We could alway back out after the summer camp if we couldn't deal with it if it was too bad. So we went for it.