Hanging up memories

Glistening ornaments transport Katie Houser back to Russia.

Seeing them hang on a tree outside her three daughters’ bedrooms, she remembers the first time they caught her eye. She had come to Rostov, one of the poorest places in Russia, alone amid negative-degree temperatures, her first international trip besides a vacation in Aruba.

She was resolute in her mission — to meet her daughter. The one she and her husband, Jody, had planned to adopt. The one for whom she’d longed through years of infertility treatments as she attended everyone else’s baby showers. The one she’d named Anna Lauren months before, whose nursery had held pillows monogrammed with her name for months.

Anna Lauren’s presents had lain unopened on Christmas Day 2001, the date Katie, a natural worrier, had set as a deadline to bring her daughter home after a year of waiting. A week later Katie and Jody received her picture in the mail, and within two months they brought home an eight-month-old who looked more like a newborn due to malnourishment.

“By the time the adoption actually happened, we were so invested in their journey that her homecoming felt miraculous,” said Kari Kampakis, a family friend who walked through the journey with the Housers. “My favorite memory is all of us waiting at the Birmingham airport with Katie and Jody's families, holding signs and feeling giddy over this child we were about to meet. And when we saw them walking toward us, cradling a little girl with black hair and porcelain skin, we lost it.”

In her time south of Moscow meeting Anna Lauren, Katie found allure in handcrafted ornaments amid the darkness and poverty of her surroundings.

Pieces were hand-painted with fastidious care, just as women working at the orphanage painted intricate designs on mirrors for the children at Christmas. In the ornamentation, Katie saw the same care and kindness the women showed when they cried as the Housers left the orphanage for the last time, their daughter in tow.

Katie can’t remember seeing the sun on any day of her trip, but the people didn’t reflect it.

 “No one is going to smile at you, but they will do anything for you,” Katie said. “You talk to them for one second, and they will invite you to their home.”

Today, mementoes from adoption journeys are in no short supply at the Housers’ home in Crestline. Both Anna Lauren, now a seventh-grader at Mountain Brook Junior High, and Emilie, a fourth-grader at Crestline, have a poster with their baby picture that friends signed and held up to greet them at the airport. Both girls lay claim to a stuffed giraffe with a photo holder that Anna Lauren and then Emilie had clung to in the weeks between meeting their parents at the orphanage and their adoption court date.

On each of their “family days,” the date each was legally adopted, they gather to eat cake and flip through their adoption scrapbooks.

But perhaps no tradition is as special as the Christmas tree. In recent years the girls have been so eager to set it out that it has gone up as early as Halloween.

For Anna Lauren’s first Christmas at home, Katie and Jody set up a small Christmas tree with colorful, intricately designed Russian ornaments they had brought back from their trip. Their collection grew as friends — including the Ortises, a fellow Crestline family that adopted twin daughters Kati and Elle, now first-graders, from Russia — visited Russia and brought items back.

The assortment of ornaments grew with their family. At age three, Anna Lauren pointed at a globe and asked her parents for a sister.

Just before Christmas in 2004, Katie and Jody returned to Rostov to find Christmas trees, ornate Father Christmases and other ornaments everywhere they looked. When Katie saw Emilie in the orphanage’s crib room, she didn’t look like the picture she had seen, but she knew it was her daughter.

“Emilie could stand up holding on to crib and was much more active and aware of her surroundings [than Anna Lauren had been],” Jody recalled.

Mom, Dad and baby sister arrived home two days before Christmas. Marking that holiday, a picture in Emilie’s scrapbook shows Katie’s father, Anna Lauren, Emilie and a cousin in matching pajamas reading a Christmas book.

A week and a half later, Katie discovered she was pregnant with their third daughter, Addison, who would be born 17 months after Emilie.

After Emilie joined their family, the Housers upgraded to a full-size tree surrounded by Russian nesting dolls and other figurines.

Anna Lauren likes the colors of the ornaments, and Addison’s favorite part is the colored lights and candy cane garland that hang around the ornaments.

But Emilie, perhaps the quietest of the three, treasures how “it is really special” to her family.