The Fundraiser Event

What a wonderful night! I have known that we have some wonderful friends in our lives, but last night was truly an evening to be remembered and thankful for the friends in our lives.  Michele Schriber, Amy Gais, Andrea McRorie, Christy Manahan and Anna Rubin, not only planned an amazing evening, but pulled off a beautiful evening to help us raise money to bring home Ivan and Toliy.  The Ranson House was decorated beautifully. The food was wonderful. And we had a house full of amazing and generous friends. I can't wait to post pictures!! We had so many people offer their help to us in the future, one friend has collected clothing for Ivan, who will need fun, hip in style teenage clothing! Another friend, has a friend who teaches Russian and offered to tutor our boys in English for free!!  My loving husband made a wonderfully heartfelt speech, and through the tears managed to get the point across, that although we never planned on adopting 2 Ukrainian brothers, these 2 boys are our sons and are meant to be in our lives forever! For those people that missed this great toast/speech - whatever you want to call it - I am posting it here!

Matt's Speech:

I assume most of you know our story from reading our blog (or technically, its Lisa’s blog).  And how we hosted Ivan and Toliy for a month this summer.  But I’m not sure if you all know how unexpected of an event it was for us to even host these boys.   Before I tell the story I’ll give some background….

Lisa has a good friend from Richmond that has donated a lot of her time to help orphans in Eastern Europe.  With members of her church, she’s traveled there a couple times and did things like putting on camps for the kids, or passing out food to orphans that had aged out and were now living out on their own.  So over the last few years Lisa has spoken at lengths with Amy about her trips there, and Lisa and I were always in awe of Amy for how much she’s given to those kids. 

So then fast forward to this past May, while I was on a golf trip in Myrtle with some friends.  Lisa is at home and sees a post on facebook from Amy about how she was going to host a child from an orphanage this summer.  The post of course had a link out to the handful of children remaining that needed host families.

 So something drew Lisa to open up the link and look at the pictures of the remaining kids, and of course saw a picture of our beautiful boys.  She immediately realized that we needed to offer a chance for them to come and have a vacation in the US.   But since the deadline for choosing a child was in 5 days, Lisa wanted to commit that day so that we could use the time to try and raise some of the airfare to bring them here.  Thus, she needed to call me in Myrtle and have a little chat. 

Since I had temporarily lost my cell phone for the day (she knew this since we had talked the night before), she called Michelle Schriber and asked her to call her husband Brendan (who was on the trip too).  Shortly after Michelle calls him, I hear Brendan yelling to me from another hole saying I needed to call Lisa.  Immediately I say to my foursome.…”Hopefully it isn’t an emergency and my kids are OK; but if they are fine, then I bet I’m in trouble for something”. 

So I called her with Matt Miller’s phone, where she immediately apologizes for making me call her on the course, but then quickly explains her story.  She tells me about seeing Amy’s post, and how she thinks it would be an amazing thing for us to host these 2 boys in July and wanted to know my thoughts.  Now yes I had had a few beers on the golf course already, but I did quickly realize this was an amazing opportunity for our whole family to do something really special.  I was just really intrigued for this unique opportunity to teach our kids about giving to others.  So I told her to sign us up, and that I loved her, and hung up; it was my turn to hit. 

So why am I telling this story?  I just wanted to explain that the last thing on my mind when we hosted these boys was the thought of adoption.  I just never thought Ivan and Anatoly would have had such an impression on our whole family.    During the last week of their stay was when I really started to see and feel the bond that had been established.  I know Lisa explains the scene at the airport in our blog, and how I literally had to carry my son Alex out of the airport because he was crying uncontrollably into my shoulder.  But I know she doesn’t explain what I saw in their eyes when saying goodbye, which was a look of total loneliness and fear (a look that said please take me home with you, don’t let me get on that plane). 

So I had initially made up my mind that day leaving the airport, telling Lisa in the car that I wanted to get the information on the process for adopting them.  But thankfully that night, my friend George McRorie gave me some good advice on trying to wait a couple weeks; and try to just go on with life for that time period, and then see if the emotions die down some before making a decision.  So that was really good for me.  I honestly thought I had convinced myself in that period that we were not going to adopt them.  It was really though that I had blocked them out of my thoughts.  I have always liked to make logical decisions, and there were many logical reasons why we shouldn’t adopt them (money, stress on marriage, not shorting the needs of my 3 biological kids first, etc).  But this was different.  Deciding not to adopt them would be something I’d regret for the rest of my life.    This was a chance to save these boys lives.  

As you can see, it was written from his heart and I had no idea what he was going to say until he stood on the stairs to give his "talk."

There were many pictures taken and I will post all of those in a separate blog entry.

Thank you again to everyone that attended the event, to everyone who donated through the website who couldn't attend or just simply wanted to help us on our journey! Our grand total at this point is $12,500!! Is that not amazing!! Matt and I are simply overwhelmed with everyone's generosity! Thank you all!