Alina 2 In the Ukrainian orphanage system, if a child turns 16 without being adopted, they are removed from the orphanage and left to fend for themselves. So when Kim and Art found out that the Alina they were in the process of adopting had a best friend, also named Alina, who was about to age out of the system, they felt they had to do something. “We asked if the other Alina wanted to be adopted too,” Kim says. “Both girls were so excited! And so we started completing all the paperwork for the second Alina, who we call Alina 2.” Flooring, a Dossier, and Baby June For the next several months, Kim and Art worked with their Ukrainian facilitation team to complete the Alinas’ adoptions. During this process, Kim became pregnant. Fast forward to January of 2020. “We were missing Alina and had never met Alina 2,” Kim says. We wanted to go meet her. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was about eight months pregnant when I attended Melaleuca’s January 2020 Launch. The next day, Art and I flew to Ukraine for a week to see Alina 1 and meet Alina 2.” When they returned, they purchased their new home. The home needed new flooring on the main level. So Kim and Art moved into the upstairs while they waited for the floors to be completed. “At this point, I’m nine months pregnant, planning a home birth, and have no floors and no internet,” Kim says. “We had just submitted our adoption dossier, and it was literally mid-flight to Ukraine when we received the notification that Ukraine had shut down due to COVID-19 and, as a result, was no longer accepting adoption dossiers. I was devastated.” According to Ukrainian adoption law, all adoption documents expire after six months. With moving, the endless adoption paperwork, the home study, and Ukraine not accepting new dossiers, Kim and Art’s fingerprint documents were set to expire. “I’m now 40 weeks pregnant and could go into labor at any minute,” Kim recalls. “And now we find out that we have to drive to Washington state to redo our fingerprints. We got them done, and the next day Washington state locked down with stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus.” Kim and Art returned home to northern Idaho safely and had to adjust their expectations yet again when Kim was told that the team she had assembled for her home birth all quit—all due to the pandemic. “I had this beautiful vision of what my home birth was going to look like, and that was not what it looked like,” Kim says. They still
had no floors and now no birth team. In the midst of these challenges along with those that come with running a business as large as Kim’s, it would have been easy for her and Art to indulge in some magical thinking. But that’s not who they are. The Phone Call Baby June ended up being a couple weeks late for her delivery. But that worked out well because it gave Kim and Art a chance to get their flooring done and arrange to have Kim’s best friend, Executive Director 9 Shawna Lambert, at the house to help with the kids. Things were going pretty well. Ukraine was only supposed to be shut down for 30 days, and then Art could go and complete the adoptions. However, those expectations were again shattered when after a month there was no word about Ukraine opening. Two months later, nothing. Three months, nothing. Four months, and still no word. Finally, more than five months later, Art received a call asking if he could travel to Ukraine in two weeks. He left on August 20 for what was supposed to be a two-and-a-half-week trip. Three days after his arrival, Ukraine shut down again. Kim and Art had a decision to make. Art could complete what he could during his stay and then return home hoping he could get back when he needed to, or he could hunker down and stay in Ukraine until his daughters were officially his. It wasn’t a hard question for them. “We’d already hit so many roadblocks and so many restarts,” Art explains. “And whenever there is a delay, documents expire. So we decided that since I was there, I would stay there, no matter how long it took. I knew we could push through—and we weren’t leaving that country without our kids.”
JANUARY 2021 | MELALEUCA.COM 11
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