Phil & Brandon Rice

Phil: We got married a little later in life. We were both in our early 30’s.

After we had been married for a few years, we started trying to have children.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t necessarily working out for us.

Brandon: We always knew in the back of our minds that adoption was an

option for us. After trying for several months and undergoing some tests,

we started talking about adopting. It ran the gamut from do we adopt

internationally or domestically? Do we do foster to adopt?

Phil: When there are big decisions in our lives, we always seem to be on the same page. The little choices are where we tend to be in different spots. We attended an adoption information meeting and there we learned about some of the different countries that were available. Russia ended up being the one that just seemed to fit well for us.

Brandon: We chose Gladney as our adoption agency. They were wonderful to work with. They hosted events for families who have adopted as well as families who are in the process of adopting. We went to one of these events, a family picnic. It was us and all these families who had adopted and their kids. The day after that picnic, we got a call from Gladney saying we had been matched with a little girl in Russia.

Phil: I was at work that day. Brandon got the call at home, and she called me at the offifice. I was getting ready to get on a conference call. Then she called my mobile phone right after that and I immediately was thinking it was an emergency. As I pick up the phone, she starts talking so fast – “That was our adoption agency, we’ve been matched with a little girl in Russia, and we have to be in Moscow in a week!” Immediately, because I work in travel, my first thought wasn’t “Wow -we’re getting ready to go on this adoption journey.” It was “Wow – plane tickets are going to be really expensive.”

Brandon: And how are we going to get a VISA in fifive days?

Phil: We tell people it was a journey of planes, trains, and automobiles.  We flew a couple of days later to Moscow. We then took an overnight train ride to the state where Alina is from. From there, we took a 2 ½ hour taxi ride in a tiny car to the small town where the baby house where Alina was.

When we got to the baby house, a couple of nurses came in with Alina and handed her to Brandon. They then handed her to me. While I was holding her, they were pointing at me and at Alina and kind of laughing. I looked over at our translator while also laughing along with them. Since they were speaking in Russian, we didn’t have any idea what they were saying. Our translator told us that they wanted to know if it was my fifirst time in Russia because the baby looked just like me.

We then had to go home without her. That was crushing. We waited a couple of months, and we went back to go to court. That’s where we had to stand before and talk in front of a Russian judge and explain why we would be good parents for Alina. That was overwhelming and we again had to leave her and go home for about a week. We went back a third time to bring her home.

Brandon: September 10, 2008, is our Gotcha Day, the day we became a

forever family.

Phil: We walked alongside people who were going through similar journeys that we had. They were questioning how they wanted to become a family and if adoption was right for them. Those journeys for families are so personal you never really want to say one way or the other or sway anyone. You don’t want to try and push one thing over another. So, really what I landed on was to tell people why we went to Russia. It’s because that’s where our daughter lived.