In September of 2020, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, after months of filing paperwork, and waiting on our next steps, we finally got word that we would be travelling to Bulgaria to meet Miglena, the girl that we have been talking with, and hoping to eventually become our daughter. But first, a little bit about how we got to this point.

The entire world changed in the spring of 2020, around mid-March. The initial reaction to the pandemic which was caused by the COVID-19 Coronavirus caused everything to come to a screeching halt. Companies shut down. Governments shut down. Stores shut down. And we were asked to stay in our homes to relieve the pending stress that would be placed on the healthcare system. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” quickly turned into (in my humble opinion) the biggest overreaction that anyone could have possibly imagined. Information steadily came out about the virus, which turned out to be not that deadly as everyone seemed to initially fear. Some of the information coming out was pushed out to us by mainstream media and some of it was completely ignored – depending on how the information fit the narrative. Some of us, hungry for more knowledge of how the virus was actually behaving turned to alternative sources of information and had to rely on common sense to determine what was real and what was not, since it was clear that we could not rely on legacy media outlets. It increasingly became more clear that this pandemic was going to be exploited by some in government and the media to the fullest in the midst of a presidential (re)election year.

How did this affect our adoption? In addition to the obvious dramatic slowing down of information flow and of paperwork processing, unessential worldwide travel stopped. Eventually, the Bulgarian government decided to allow Trip 1 meetings between parents and perspective children to be done virtually. This would consist of five days of meetings on Skype. I don’t know how every one of these meetings went, but I do know how one of them went (as reported from a close friend of ours who was in the same process with just about the same timeline as us), and it did not go well. I would imagine that most of the Trip 1 virtual meetings did not go well if they were with older children, but I don’t know that for sure. I was REALLY hoping that an in-person trip could be made. Well, that was the case. The Bulgarian representatives on our case and the Bulgarian government, felt that in our case, given the trauma that Miglena had experienced, both with the abandonment of both of her parents, and from a couple of events that had happened to her within the past couple of years, that we should meet with her face-to-face. Thank God! I was not looking forward to trying to connect on an emotional level with a girl who we did not know at all who spoke a completely different language.

Sidebar: blogging for me has been something that has fallen by the wayside. It takes time that I usually don’t have and I don’t really have much confidence in my own writing abilities to tell the story better than video does. So I thought I’d tell the story this time around through video.

Below is a video of our trip to Bulgaria to meet the girl named Miglena who would eventually be come to known as Meagan Grace.

Video of our Trip #1 to Bulgaria to meet Miglena face to face.