After working late nights for years to get our business established, life was so perfect we needed to share it with a little one.

I took this photo a few moments after we met Olya (in red) in a Ukrainian orphanage. Five weeks later she became our daughter.

Me playing Simon Says with Olya and her classmates. The teacher walked away and Ron and I were left to supervise 12 children who didn’t speak English! We made up games, and played with them for an hour.

Olya and I had a quiet moment alone in her classroom to bond and color together. Would we ever know how she came to be in the orphanage?

I traced my hands and drew funny animals on my finger tips.

Then Olya traced her hands and drew on her fingertips.

The yellow girl on the right is Olya soon after she came to the orphanage. Years later Olya told us a troubling story about this day.

The orphanage had cut off Olya’s long hair. The day we adopted her we took her to a circus where she saw this colorful wig. She was happy to have long hair again.

Home in the U.S., this was one of Olya’s first drawings. It is of her, me, my husband, and my parents under a rainbow.

Olya is the cat in the middle. She was a great athlete. I drew and painted the animals in the background.

When Olya learned English, she told us she had two brothers. Ron and I knew we had to try to find them, but how?

It had been five years since Olya and her brothers had seen each other. They spoke three different languages, but were happy to be together again, if only for a few days.

Her oldest brother, Andry, was still in a Ukrainian orphanage, and asked us to adopt him. Our friends warned us against adopting a teenager with a dark past, but how could we not?

They had come to see Olya.

On the way to the village where the children had lived before they were taken to live in an orphanage.

The visit to the village was like traveling back in time 100 years. No one had cars or indoor plumbing. .

People walked their cows, and herded flocks of geese down the dirt roads.

The houses each had colorful gates painted with storks, flowers or designs. Andry told us a Ukrainian saying. You can tell a good man because his house has a good gate. Their house never had a gate.

As soon as we arrived the neighbors, all elderly women, came out to see “the Americans”. They especially wanted to see Olya.

We met the children’s biological parents and grandparents. We discovered that the children’s biological grandfather was a murderer.

Andry showed Olya the bed where they had slept when they were little. It had caught on fire and the grandmother had saved them.

Andry and Olya with their biological mother, Maria, showing the pysanky she had made.

Andry at the graves of his great grandparents. Under Stalin three of their children starved and were buried in an unmarked mass grave along with 30% of the villagers.

The trip to adopt Andry should have taken two weeks but it took seven. We were all frazzled with the red tape, waiting and uncertainty.

We took a side trip to the Carpathean Mountains but ended up fleeing, with thousands of other people, to escape a giant phosphorus cloud caused by a train derailment.

Adoption day! Andry was finally our son.

In Miami, the children were happy to be home. Years earlier, Andry had looked at a world map and dreamed of what it would be like to live there.

Andry was excited to dress up for Halloween for the first time.

The kids, with our cats, visiting their new grandparents.

Andry didn’t speak English, and was dependent on us for everything. We got him a puppy so he would have the experience of being needed.

Olya also got a dog. She named her pup Applesauce.

Both kids spent time at the beach with friends and learned to surf.

Olya on prom night posing with Ron and me before her date arrived.

Andry with his prom date.

Olya became one of the best high school pitchers in the state of Florida.

This was Andry’s photo-class assignment: reinact a moment in history.

The kids and me in Ecuador to volunteer to help build a school.

Andry wanted to go back to Ukraine with Olya to revisit their past.

We stayed in the village, at Andry’s first grade teacher’s house.

The teacher had a photo of Andry, his classmates and her. (He and his siblings were taken to an orphanage soon after this photo was taken.)

We visited the village school. His first grade teacher asked Andry’s former classmates to sit at the desks they had been in eight years earlier.

Andry with his first grade classmates, all girls. The other boys had dropped out of school or moved away.

On our first visit, Maria never smiled because she didn’t have teeth. Nikolai, the biological father, had knocked them out. We had gotten her dental implants and this trip she smiled a lot.

Olya wanted to know if Maria had any baby photos of her. This is the earliest photo of Olya.

This is the earliest photo of Andry

Maria cooked borscht for us, what Olya used to call pink soup.

A photo that hung on the wall was a reminder of a devastating incident that shaped the family.

We walked all over the village of 2,000 inhabitants retracing the children’s life.

This is the playground at the now defunct preschool that Andry had attended.

This was the outhouse at the preschool

Teenagers swimming and a woman gathering reeds to make a broom, as is the custom.

An early photo of Maria, Andry and Nikolai. With our help Maria had divorced him and he had moved on.

Nikolai had gotten word that we were visiting and showed up.

Andry confronted his biological father.

The collective farm where Maria had worked milking cows, before the fall of the USSR.

Villagers danced and played traditional music for us.

We gave Maria money so she could have a proper door installed.

This was the first orphanage where the children were taken.

The director and staff agreed to give Olya and Andry a tour of their former orphanage.

This is the bedroom where the children slept.

The children did class work and had their meals at these desks.

Olya and Andry at the entrance to the playground

Andry walking over the monkey bars that he had once crawled across.

At a restaurant for lunch. Maria has on the locket I gave her with the children’s photos.

Olya’s second orphanage was not very welcoming. They did let her sit at her old desk.

Andry visited with his friends at the orphanage in Bucha and took them an Xbox.

This tank was a WWII memorial that sat in front of the orphanage. (In 2022 the Russians invaded Bucha, and destroyed this tank and the orphanage.)

Back in the village, we saw kids jumping from the bridge.

The trail we walked between the teacher’s house and Maria’s house.

The village store carried candy, icecream, sausages, softdrinks, alcohol and vareniki. The villagers grew most of their food.

The typical house in the village had a lot of decoration and a fancy gate.

Before we left, Andry sat with his grandmother, Hannah, and asked her questions about the family’s past. No matter how painful, she answered every question.