To Sing Frogs Chapter 5b

One of Celeste’s soft books. As you can see by crayon marks and stains, it was used and well loved.

Ekaterina Anatolyevna Koshkina was going to have her fifth birthday in less than a month. Her little sister, Lyubov Anatolyevna Koshkina, was two and a half and lived in a different orphanage. That made absolutely no sense to me. It made Amy cry. Again.

“We want to be there for Katya’s birthday,” Amy explained over the phone to our contact at Little Miracles. My wife sat anxiously on the edge of her chair with elbows planted on the disorganized papers from the girls’ file.

“Okay, when’s her birthday?”

“December 17^th.”

“Oh! Um, well, that’s less than three weeks away. I don’t know if we can move quickly enough.”

Amy bit her trembling lip. “She’s been through so much. Can’t we do something? John and I really want to be there for her birthday.”

Little Miracles told Amy they would see what they could do. Then they reminded her, Russians don’t get into a hurry for small stuff. A birthday for a five-year-old orphan, who had probably never celebrated one in her life, would hardly be considered monumental.

It wasn’t.

Then the system shut down for the holidays.

Getting the Russian system up and running after holidays does eventually happen. Trees die of old age. Still, it would be two months after Katya’s birthday before we would visit the city that was home to the Russian Pacific Fleet of nuclear submarines and warships. The place had been strictly off limits to any foreigners, and particularly Americans until after the fall of the Reds.

Thanks be to everything holy for the Internet. It kept Amy busy, which in turn kept me sane.

I guess only a person who has suffered through a family life provided by a notorious sex felon could understand Amy’s commitment and dedication to these two abused little girls. My wife felt like she could relate to them. She put herself into their shoes as she set about thinking of solutions to any fears they might have of real or imagined possibilities.

Amy researched online, studying about every challenge we might encounter. Her mind went to work. Children coming out of orphanages in Russia were famous for hoarding food when they got home. They must be afraid they won’t always have enough to eat. Older children who were adopted at Katya’s age had eventually divulged they were afraid their new parents might abuse them too. I need to help them get to know family members before they come home. Some adopted children later laughed about fears of getting lost on the way to their new home. They had wondered if they might be better off staying in the orphanage, rather than to take the risk. After all, Amérika was a land far, far away. That’s easy.

I had never seen my wife so calculating and so organized, intent on the perfect execution of an endeavor. I have to say it was fun to experience. Emotions and feelings still mattered and Amy moved to protect those feelings in the most practical manner I had ever seen her function.

One afternoon I came home a couple of hours early to find blinds and curtains drawn to allow the maximum amount of natural light into the house. Supplies of all kinds were strewn throughout the living room. There were small bundles of colored cloth, a bolt of white linen, and a roll of stiff backing piled haphazardly on the floor. Inkjet iron-on kits spilled from the couch along with printer cartridges. The sewing machine and table had been retrieved from some obscure but sacred burial-ground in our basement, which Amy fondly referred to as “storage.” They were now resurrected, cleaned, and prepared for new life.

Amy was sewing like a woman possessed. Scraps of material littered the area surrounding her feet. Scissors, pencils, straightedges, spools of thread, and other paraphernalia were scattered about on the table.

“I’m making soft books!” she said happily.

“Soft what?”

“Soft books. You know. Quiet books. Cloth books, like ones people use to keep their kids occupied at church.”

“Uh-huh. Where are the boys?”

“They’re upstairs playing, at least they were a few minutes ago. Wanna help me?”

Curiosity got the best of me. I’m usually brighter when it comes to avoiding arts and crafts. Not today.

Amy had spent time on the computer putting together pages for a book about the journey home. There were pictures of hotels and hotel rooms, airports and airplanes, restaurants and rental cars, even a hotel swimming pool. Each page had a few simple sentences of explanation in English and Russian. Pictures of the sun and airplanes joined descriptions of how pilots would follow the source of light from Russia to Amérika. Nobody was going to get lost. Then there was another book with a page of pictures and a few sentences about each room of the house. This included the newly remodeled bedroom for the girls. Amy had really gone to an extreme with that one. She finished it off with swarms of Mod Podge butterflies coming out from behind each headboard and rising to cross the ceiling. The snapshots of the kitchen showed a basket full of every fruit imaginable to a Russian orphan. The caption explained there was always something to eat in the basket and family members could have it whenever they wanted. So much for a need to hoard food. Amy had also created a page of photos and captions for each member of the family. I already knew about that. I hadn’t envisioned the grand creation, though. All of these pages were to be printed off on inkjet iron-ons, then transferred to linen material that would be sewn around backing. The entire books would be bound with colorful cloth. The cloth picture-books couldn’t be torn and they could be washed if they got dirty. With the phrases being written in Russian as well as English, hopefully, workers would spend time going through them with the girls. Later on, we could read the books to them in English.

Amy was on a roll and I was impressed.