Papa For Hire True confessions time: Blogging is not Papa's fulltime job, merely a helpful exercise to keep the right side of his brain from atrophying. Papa's days for the last twenty years have been filled with financial analysis and reporting, project control, budget development and tracking, accounting, office management and program administration. In short, I'm a spreadsheet geek...and damned proud of it.

If you know of any left-brain openings in the Washington, D.C. area for the new year (especially with family-friendly employers), please let Papa know. Thanks!  ¶ 10:27 AM 0 comments

  She'll Take Manhattan After two days in New Jersey, we were ready to move on to "the city." New York was great, but you don't realize how stroller-unfriendly it is with its crowded restaurants and huge stairways into facilities like the subway which are somehow exempted from the ADA.
With no Chanukah bush in sight, the tree in the lobby of our hotel made a nice substitute for a family picture. We saw the big tree at Rockefeller Center and a few store windows and basically did what we do best in NYC--walked. And we shopped. And we ate. Zoe passed on most of the culinary delights the city offered in favor of applesauce.
The highlight of our trip was a visit to the Childrens Museum of Manhattan on the Upper West Side. They have a big Dora the Explorer exhibit. Dora is one of three American toddler cultural icons Zoe has embraced (the other two being Elmo and Mickey Mouse) and she was genuinely thrilled to be there. No holiday road trip to NJNY would be complete without somehow celebrating our friend Julie's birthday. Zoe had a great time hanging out with Michelle and Rebecca at the Menlo Park Mall. The Cheesecake Factory's menu probably has about 200 items for Zoe to choose from, and she thoroughly enjoyed her applesauce.  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments

  Chanukah Part(y) III...Road Trip The trip to Baltimore gave us an hour headstart towards our first holiday destination of Wayne, New Jersey for Zoe's first car roadtrip. She did great on the 3-1/2 hour ride, even joining me in cursing the Delaware Department of Transportation's $1 toll increase on their piddling stretch of highway (which actually amounts to a $1.75 increase for EZPass users).

A visit to the Magentas became a two-day orgy of food, fun and laughter. Zoe ate and ate...applesauce. Counting another celebration not documented herein, this was our fourth Chanukah party in a week, and the holiday was still 24 hours away from its official start.

We introduced Zoe to the sport of geocaching, where she joined Team Love Cloud on its first find.

And, we're off to the remote island of Manhattan...

  ¶ 6:19 PM 0 comments

  Chanukah Part(y) II Our holiday week began with a trip to the Baltimore area for Sari's extended family pre-Chanukah celebration. Once again, Zoe met and charmed even more relatives, like cousins Heather and Sharon. Zoe also met great-great-aunt Shirley, who also came to America as a little girl from Eastern Europe (albeit 97 years earlier).Bananas have now been supplanted by applesauce as Zoe's favorite food. As a traditional fixin' to the potato latke, the liquid gold was thankfully in abundant supply as the newly-opened Motts pipeline flowed freely from Washington to New York.  ¶ 11:31 PM 0 comments

  A Very Zoe Holiday... We're off for a few days as Zoe explores the mid-Atlantic region on her first road trip. The various Chanukah celebrations started a week early last Sunday and continue through New Year's Day, meaning a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar now has a lifespan this year of 15 days.

Dogs may become an issue over the holidays, as several of our family and friends we'll be visiting have them. Zoe lives in fear of dogs--the only ones she knows from her orphanage life are the mean-looking guard dogs. She hasn't made the association that there's a warm and fuzzy variety trained to cuddle and play and love. Family allergies prevent us from having a dog--not to mention the lack of responsibility we've demonstrated in caring for living things such as houseplants. So we're packing the Benadryl while keeping our fingers crossed as Zoe meets her new canine friends.

We'll have plenty of photos and good stuff to share when we return in 2006. We wish you all the best for a safe, happy holiday season.  ¶ 9:46 AM 2 comments

  Scenes from a Mall What better place to spend a Sunday two weeks before Christmas than a shopping mall? Jesse and I are both big model train fans, so we enjoyed the huge display at Towson's Shops at Kenilworth. Zoe was more interested in her new pastime--throwing coins into the huge fountain.

Here's the windup...

...and the pitch! We emptied the pennies from all our pockets. In all, Zoe threw about fifteen of them. Coincidentally, the same 15¢ is about equal to what the orphanage back in Yekaterinburg receives in government funding to care for each child each day.

Is this a great country, or what?  ¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments

  Our Other Star...Jesse While Zoe is clearly the star of this blog, let's remember big brother Jesse's role in day-to-day operations.

Much like Ted Williams' head, Jesse's own place in cyberspace was cryogenically frozen in time back in 2002, when the last update was made to the Jesseplex (the state of the art in kid websites from the last millenium). Jesse is now six and doing incredibly well in the first grade.

Our adoption journey began shortly before Jesse's fourth birthday. Jesse has always been very perceptive; we knew there would be lots of talk on the phone and with friends and family about our plans. So from the outset, we decided it would be best to be up front with him so we wouldn't have to whisper and talk in code.

We showed him a map of the world and pointed out our location, then way off to the right we showed him a far-off land called Russia. Summoning the ghosts of Robert Young, Hugh Beaumont and Robert Reed, I told Jesse that somewhere in Russia was a little girl (we were always planning on a girl) who didn't have a mommy or daddy. Then I moved on to talk about how some babies, like Jesse, came out of their mommies' tummies.

Before I could get to the point of the long-winded diatribe, Jesse quickly interrupted me. "Are we going to adopt her?"

With that, we knew Jesse was onboard with "Project Tatiana," as we code-named the operation. From that day continuing for the next two years, Jesse proudly talked to everybody about his baby sister in Russia, who he knew only conceptually for the year before our referral, and then only through our photos for another year. Jesse's patience, whether genuine or part of a secret desire to remain an only child just a little while longer, helped us get through some very tough moments.

From their first meeting, Jesse and Zoe embraced each other with open arms and have been inseparable. Jesse grabs her hand when we're out in public and makes sure to introduce her to each new acquaintance, unsolicited. They are playmates and best friends. When they're not together, each will ask about the other's whereabouts. There is a little teasing and taunting, but usually there's constant laughter whenever they're together.

There is a word in Yiddish--b'shert--which expresses the idea that something is meant to be, destined. If anyone out there happens to be publishing a Yiddish dictionary with pictures, feel free to use this one royalty-free.  ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments

  Airing Our Dirty Laundry We still haven't caught up with the laundry since returning from Russia six weeks ago. The combination of additional clothing demands from our larger family and sheer laziness has created a never-ending surplus of clothes in need of washing. The best estimate judging from the satellite view of Mt. Laundry, as I've dubbed the ever-changing pile of soiled fabric in our basement, currently puts us about three washloads away from completion.Laundry is the highlight of Zoe's early homeschooling curriculum, and she seems to love it. She looks forward to visiting Mt. Laundry with me, rolling in it as if making a snow angel. She'll start by standing by the dryer to put in the wet clothes I pull out of the washer. Then we move on to scale Mt. Laundry together. I'll call out a color and she picks out all the items of that color to create a washload and slam-dunks them into the washer drum. With so much laundry to deal with, we can create entire washloads consisting of just one color, and not just whites. Yesterday we did a blue load and then a red load. If we wait a few weeks, even lowly chartreuse could get its own exclusive wash and dry.

While I get the arduous washer/dryer detail in the basement, Sari gets the cushy job of supervising sorting and folding operations from the comfort of the bedroom. Zoe enjoys delivering each item to the proper room after receiving instructions, often one piece at a time. She's well aware that her toddler socks won't fit my size 14 feet, but nevertheless brings them to me and laughs hysterically as she encourages me to try them on.

We've promised ourselves real, paid help with childcare and the laundry upon Sari's return to the working world in January. While I'll be sorry to see Mt. Laundry go, the potential of having my own clean, matched socks available 24/7 is just too good to pass up.  ¶ 7:02 AM 0 comments

  Papa's Little Girl?
Up to this point, photos of Zoe and I together are extremely rare. At the lowpoint of our relationship back in Russia when Zoe was screaming bloody murder at my very presence, we faced the challenge of getting a mandatory photo of the three of us to show the judge at our hearing. Not having access to photo manipulation software overseas, we simply set up a two-shot of Sari and Zoe, then I managed to sneak into the back of the pose.

What you're seeing here is the real deal, not some Photoshop fantasy. If you don't believe me, consider this...if it were faked, wouldn't I have given myself more hair?  ¶ 5:54 AM 0 comments

  Primetime Post-Mortem In spite of (or perhaps because of) the advance buzz, what we saw last night wasn't a condemnation of the international adoption process. What we saw was Masha, an incredibly brave child sexual abuse victim willing to tell her story.

Did authorities place Masha with a father they knew (or should have known) was a pedophile? With a clean criminal record, the only indication rested with Matthew Mancuso's estranged adult biological daughter. Also a victim of Mancuso's abuse, she came out with the revelation for the first time on last night's broadcast. (Even her own mother was unaware of the extent of the abuse.)

The ex-wife and adult daughter were never contacted to address his parenting skills (or more specifically, lack thereof) as part of the investigation in advance of the adoption. But the daughter wasn't ready to talk at that time, either. She learned of the adoption and, while appalled, maintained her silence.

Where "the system" clearly failed was through the complete absence of post-placement home visits, which certainly would have indicated a problem. Masha had no bedroom. The adoption professionals who handled the case understandably weren't willing to comment.

Reporting was fair and balanced. The international adoption folks got plenty of airtime to condemn the Mancuso case along with the handful of other Russian adoptions gone bad (which ABC didn't even bring up) and point out the 49,000 success stories from Russia since the program opened.

It's a story laden with both horror and hope, and one that needed to be told. Given that the "news" of the Mancuso story is so dated and that ABC responsibly presented this as an isolated incident, the effect this much-feared broadcast will have on future international adoptions is negligible.

Blogger's Disclosure: The blogger is still a shareholder of The Walt Disney Company, of which ABC is a subsidiary.  ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments

  Primetime Broadcast Tonight Confirmed on ABC's website: the Matthew Mancuso story will air tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern.

"A Russian orphan adopted by an American man speaks out for the first time about being molested by her adoptive father--who posted explicit photographs of the little girl online."

It's hard to get much out of a one-sentence synopsis, but perhaps Masha's story will be presented as one isolated tragic and newsworthy tale, not a hasty generalization showing adoptive parents as abusive human traffickers and those involved in the adoption process as incompetent and greedy.

To ensure ABC is employing fair, unbiased reporting, let's keep our eyes and ears open for:

Statistics. If and when they start throwing out numerators of international adoptions gone bad in the U.S., let's make sure they're put in context by also including the proper demoninator:

• 5,000 adoptions from Russia per year at current levels
• 23,000 total international adoptions per year at current levels
• 49,000 total adoptions from Russia since the program opened in 1992
• 227,000 total international adoptions since 1990

Sexism. See if the report hints that someone should have seen a red flag simply because a single man looked to adopt a child. Would such a flag be raised if a single woman looked to adopt a child?

The little I know about Mancuso's background--and I'm sure we'll all know more after tonight's broadcast--is that he has an adult-aged (biological) daughter with whom he has no relationship. That's what should have been investigated prior to approving his home study, and it wasn't. Otherwise, free of a criminal record, Mancuso was as qualified to adopt as "the next guy."

Post-mortem on the broadcast to follow.

  ¶ 3:47 AM 0 comments