Friday, July 23, 2004 was a normal day for Tamara and Brett Stover. The couple finished work, Tamara at ADP and Brett at Eden Hospital, and both arrived home to kick off another weekend. Then something happened that changed their lives forever.
“I was reading the Pleasanton Weekly, and I saw a picture of these kids,” she said. “I showed Brett, and said, ‘these are our kids.”
The picture she showed her husband was of three Russian siblings who were visiting the area in hopes of finding adoptive parents. The story was part of a larger Weekly feature on local families impacted by adoption from Russia.
“The next day, we went to a park in Danville and met the kids,” said Tamara Stover.
The Stovers discovered the trio, Olya, 9; Anna, 8; and Vas, 7; were orphaned in 2002 when their father died of heart problems and their mother was killed about six months later. The trio had been living in an orphanage located a couple of hours outside of Moscow.
“In the orphanage, people who are good and nice can go to America to be adopted,” said Olya, who is now 16 and a freshman at Foothill High School. “But we thought it was a vacation.”
During that six-week visit, the siblings stayed with Pleasanton residents Bruce and Vivian Henig who helped facilitate the early meetings with the Stovers.
“After spending time with the kids at the park, we went to lunch at the Henig’s and went to their cabin the next weekend,” said Tamara Stover.
After some hurried background checks, Olya, Anna and Vas spent the last week of their US visit with the Stovers to see if they meshed as a family.
“They bought us bikes,” recalls Vas Stover, now 13, “after that we knew they were going to adopt us. What else would they do with the bikes?”
The kids may have had a hunch about the future, but nothing was decided. While the Stovers had been considering adoption as a way to build their family, they hadn’t started the process at the time they bid a tearful goodbye to the siblings at SFO.
“It was awful sending them back to Russia,” said Tamara Stover. “We didn’t know what would happen.”
For the next two months the couple spent every evening pulling together the 50 documents needed for approval as adoptive parents and studying the Russian language. They made 15 trips to Sacramento to have documents certified and even sent a cookie bouquet to a slow moving bureaucrat.
“Any family member or Russian citizen can claim them before adoption,” said Tamara Stover, “and we had no way of knowing if they were still available, so we had to move fast.”
After changes in Russia’s adoption process suspended their first attempt to bring the kids home, the couple headed to Moscow Feb. 3, 2005, a little over six months after meeting the kids. They spent a little more than a week in Russia finalizing the adoption, shopping for keepsakes and getting immigration visas finalized before flying home as a family of five.
When the kids arrived in Pleasanton, the Stovers faced a new challenge. The kids spoke virtually no English and this time, there were no translators to help.
Brett Stover’s study of Russian paid off. He was able use some basic Russian phrases with the kids and the Stovers started teaching them English right away.
“It was like teaching a preschooler to read,” Brett Stover said. “We had to start with the ABCs.”
Vas picked up the language first, but his sisters struggled. After six months, the kids stopped speaking Russian to each other and began mostly using English.
“With the girls, Olya especially, it was like teaching an adult a language,” Brett Stover said. “She had to translate everything, but Vas learned it just watching TV.”
The kids are still tutored in math and English when they’re not in school and have settled into the American way of life. Olya, 16, is a cheerleader at Foothill. Anna, now 14, is in the eighth grade at Hart Middle School and is taking skating lessons. Vas, 13, is a seventh grader at Hart Middle School and plays football for the Pleasanton Junior Football League Cowboys.
For the past 3 1/2 years, the Stovers have spent their vacations taking long driving trips to show the kids their new country and have visited Disneyland nine times.
“We’ve been to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Chicago, the arch in Saint Louis, Mount Rushmore,” Anna said. Yet through all the travels, she maintains her favorite thing about her adopted country is meeting new people.
“The kids have done a great job transitioning into the American lifestyle and culture,” said Tamara Stover. “We’re really proud of them.”
