We have a daughter who is the center of our world. We would do anything (and everything) for her if we could do so.

Our daughter's name is Nichole Ekaterina Renea' Lisbon, and she is now seven years old, a peanut of a child with long, auburn hair and huge eyes that miss very little. We adopted her from Russia when she was four, and it was a very long, hard fight; when we finally brought her home from the airport, the tears, the excitement, and the mounds of paperwork, appointments with various lawyers, and the uncertainty of not knowing whether she was going to be ours soon became a distant memory.

Nichole, as we soon named our daughter upon her arrival into America, was everything we could have ever hoped for. She wsa very cute, and when we first saw her picture that the adoption agency, Children's Hope International, had sent us, we were instantly charmed and smitten. We knew even back thten that this little girl, Ekaterina, would be the child we'd always wanted, and that she would someday be ours.

We weren't, however, prepared for all the beaurocratic red tape, or the the endless waiting. Not knowing whether she would be ours and hearing conflicting reports from the agency, our lawyers, or other people was probably the hardest thing that myself and my husband, Charlie, had ever faced since finding out that Charlie and I were unable to have children of our own.

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The call finally came several months later, the call that would change our lives forever. The person on the other end of the phone said that our adoption of little Ekaterina had been approved. Ekaterina was to be ours. OURS. We finally were going to get the child we had always dreamed of having. At long last, after what seemed like years of tears and grief, we were finally to become a FAMILY.

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We picked up our daughter on a cold, grey February afternoon three years ago. We met her at the airport, and I tell you, it was pure bliss! We felt like we were having a baby, except that this baby wsa coming to us on an airplane instead of from mommy's tummy. And our child wasn't even an infant: she was a small, proabably very scared, little four-year-old girl!

We saw the child being led down the aisle by a tired, but smiling, tall, elegant-looking woman in a red uniform. "Here--iss-you--daughter", she said in a heavy, Russian-accented voice. "Congratulations." She introduced the child as Ekaterina, and to her, she said, "This is  your new mother and father. They are so very glad to see you." (She spoke to the child in Russian, so the child could understand what was happening to her.)

Ekaterina cried when Charlie and I took turns hugging her to our bodies, and we could hardly see for the tears that were coming from OUR eyes. We were both surprised at how tiny she was. She was hardly bigger than a minute, and she was so fragile: it was as though she were made of eggshells, and we were afraid to hug her hard, for fear we might break her in two. But the joy we felt at that moment was--and will always be--the memory that Ekaterina (Nichole) was now truly and officially ours. She was now our daughter. And we were now a FAMILY. Forever.