Christmas will be much different this year for Bruce, Nancy, Alexandrea and Gus Hackel.
“We’ll be celebrating the fact our family is full,” said Bruce Hackel, a former Crete village trustee who sells real estate in the south suburbs. “We won’t be spending it thinking, `Boy, if we could just have one more child.’ We feel blessed and fortunate to have two.”
More Top Picks Best Gaming Headsets
The heightened joy in the Hackel home this holiday season is because of 2-year-old Gus, whom the family adopted from an orphanage 700 miles northeast of Moscow.
The blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler was named Gus after Nancy Hackel’s father. The boy’s birth name, Dmitry, is now his middle name.
“(He) is a gift from God, just as if he came from Nancy,” Bruce Hackel said.
Gus has been learning English at an amazing rate, said Nancy Hackel. His growing vocabulary includes “doggy,” “kitty,” “daddy,” “mommy” and “kismas” for Christmas, she said.
“Gus understands more than he speaks,” she said. “We’re reading picture books to him every night. He knows exactly what I’m saying to him.”
Due to fertility problems, it took a long time for Nancy to become pregnant with Alexandrea, now age 5. Not sure she’d be able to bear another child, the Hackels began considering adoption.
Daunted by domestic red tape and fearful they “would fall in love with a child and the parents would come back,” in July 1996, the Hackels got in touch with Washington, D.C.-based International Children’s Alliance, which places orphaned children from Russia and China with American families.
In May, the Hackels were headed to Russia to meet their son.
“The Russians have first adoption rights,” Bruce Hackel noted, although the extremely depressed economy has made it difficult to support more than one child. “The Russians do not easily give up these children.”
Before arriving in Russia, the Hackels had received photos of Gus. The healthy toddler who won their hearts also had the good fortune of being born in October 1995–one month after Russia opened its doors to adoption.