The perfect risk

Nos mudamos a nuestra casa en septiembre de 2004, luego de 2 años de casados, esperábamos la pronta llegada del bebé.
El cuarto destinado para nuestro hijo lo pintamos color "verde esperanza" con la ilusión que en "casa nueva vida nueva" llegaría pronto... pero no fue así.
Pasaron los años, mudarnos a esa casa nos trajo muchísimas alegrías, nuevos amigos con los que compartimos muchos lindos momentos y el lugar que consideramos "nuestro lugar en el mundo" para vivir.
Pero en nuestro hogar y en nuestro corazón siguió esperando completamente vacio ese cuarto verde esperanza...

Cuantas historias que compartimos quienes nos convertimos en padres a través de la adopcion...

THE PERFECT RISK

By Jeremy Podolski (For Jeremy, Kari and Alayna-Maria Podolski)

For three years, the little bedroom off our main hallway looked like a museum exhibit for a child’s room – bright and colorful, fully furnished, packed with toys and impossibly neat...In all of the ways that mattered most, that room was quite empty.I consider that room a barometer for the last 10 years of our lives. When my wife, Kari, and I first moved into our little house nine months after our wedding day, that room was left untouched, a blank canvas of four white walls. Throughout the next few years, the room became a harbor for things without a home – a spare desk, an extra chair, a bookshelf, a potted plant. None of it matched. They were things good enough to keep but useless enough to keep out of the way.As we began trying to have a family, we cleared the room out in anticipation of a child that never came. Vacant again. It wasn’t until we started our adoption process that the room began to flicker with life and personality... We painted the room in bright colors and added a crib... Three years later, the room looked much the same, like a catalogue page clipped and saved for posterity. Little changed until I found Kari in the room one morning with an armful of white bed sheets. With a quiet sadness, she was packing away the toys and decorations and carefully draping the sheets over the furniture. When she was done, the room looked like a graveyard, which I suppose wasn’t far from the truth. Three years of waiting can effectively bury your dreams.I consider that day one of the darkest of my life. Since submitting our dossier to ICBF in June 2004, we had endured a necessary amendment to a document, a worker strike, a presidential election and a change in program leadership, all of which contributed to a delay in our progress and marked deceleration of child referrals. It was early 2007 and our dossier still had not been moved to a regional office, and we had no indication of when it would be moved... We truly believed our child was in Colombia, but it seemed like every sign was telling us to back out and change course. Through long talks and deep thought, we made the right choice to persevere, but it was not the last risk we would face.Considering that our next step was still to move to a regional office, I was considerably excited when my phone rang at work on March 16 of this year and Julie was on the other end. It wasn’t the news I had expected. It was far better and much more terrifying.Julie told me of a little girl waiting for a family. She was 16 months old at the time and at a crossroads in the system. As an infant, she had undergone open heart surgery for a congenital heart defect. She appeared healthy now, but she had some additional medical concerns that were not so clear. Would we consider her?I don’t know if I spoke anything comprehensible at that point. I did manage to successfully request her photo and all the information Julie had, but other than my body’s persistent shaking, I don’t remember much until the photo came. I don’t think I looked at anything else for the rest of the day... There was a lot to consider as we struggled to understand what medical needs this little girl would have. Would we be equipped to care for her? Were we prepared for a toddler as opposed to the infant for whom we had planned? Were we the family she needed? We were excited but scared of the unknown. We pored over translated medical records and asked for more. Even as we doubted ourselves, Kari and I felt ourselves coming to the same conclusion. The only risk was in doing nothing.Our daughter’s name is Alayna-Maria Kristine Podolski. She was born Nov. 1, 2005 in Barrancabermeja and was fostered in the beautiful city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. We first held her on June 25, 2007, and we are never letting go. We arrived home as a family on July 28.A lot happened between making the decision to adopt Alayna and today. The story of our journey to Colombia, our incredible experience there and our return home is told in detail here, within the pages of this blog. The invitation to read it is open to anyone who is interested. I will simply add that we love Colombia in a way that we never imagined we could love a place. Though our five-week stay had many challenges, we came home with an incredible bond with our daughter and a similar bond to her native country. Alayna will grow up knowing what a proud and friendly place she is from and how thankful we are that we were able to experience her homeland and its people in such depth.Alayna has changed our lives in all of the obvious ways, but the path to finding her has guaranteed that we take nothing for granted. Every time she says “mamá” or “papá”, any smile she flashes, any puzzle she solves, any nook she explores we embrace and absorb. We remember too well what life was like without them.We hung three Christmas stockings in our house for the first time this year. Guess whose is the biggest. A plastic car we bought two years ago is now being pushed along imaginary roads in the carpet. A singing plush animal that long sat quiet and motionless now fills our house with music.And that bedroom, empty for so many years, is now the pulse of our home. The little girl inside shimmers with spirit and spontaneity, intelligence and humor. She ensures nothing is mundane. She has rewarded our faith in every way imaginable. And what she endured through major surgery, countless hospital visits and multiple guardians has shown us what strength and courage truly are. We like to think her bravery has been rewarded as well.For every concern we had about her health, we received results that were far more positive than we believed possible. Any doubt we had about being prepared to care for a child her age seems laughable now. She was, in truth, the perfect age for us. Or maybe it’s just that she was perfect for us.I will be forever thankful that we didn’t let this gift pass us by. How fortunate we are to share our lives with someone who is so interesting, disarming and curious. If we hadn’t taken the risk, how else would we know:…Alayna’s favorite animals are zebras?…she blows kisses to say thank you?…she likes to color in the knotholes of our wood paneling with chalk?…she gasps when she sees a water tower?…that the only thing better than singing is singing in sign language?…that nothing gets a laugh like a game of chase or a bucket of bath water dumped on her head?…that if it has wheels, she can drive it?…that it is possible for every day to be better than the one before it?Happy is our new normal. That’s a nice feeling, especially this time of year, surrounded by family, we feel like ours is finally here.