Whether you are a prospective adoptive parent needing motivation because Moscow is taking so long to sign off on the re-accreditations or a parent already home needing some inspiration, you'll be in luck this weekend: Dateline NBC is going to re-run a remarkable story on Russian adoption.

Correspondent Keith Morrison's story originally aired last June. It is the story of Lisa and Hythem Salem, "two regular people in an average suburb in America", as Morrison called them. Not saints, to repeat my rant of the other day, regular people. Regular people who chose adoption, and who chose Russia.

But while their adoption journey started out like many of ours, how it ended was anything but regular.

The Salems got their referral in August 1998, but didn't get to travel until January 1999. The babies they were referred--boy and girl fraternal twins--where tiny for their age. Smaller even then my older son, 18 pounds at 18 months old when I adopted him from Vladivostok later in 1999. They had doctors telling them, much the way the first adoption doctor I sent my referral to told me, that their babies were too small, too sickly, too much of a risk.

Of course, as most of you have probably guessed by now, the Salems' twins grew up just fine. They were healthy, bubbly six-year-olds when Dateline first met them in 2004.

So what was not so regular about this adoption? Well, there were, according to Dateline, 300,000 children in Russia's orphanages in 1999; there are nearly 900,000 now.

That's not the twist to this story, and if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to give it away here. You'll have to watch for yourself. But here's what the show's producer wrote about the Salems in her blog about the segment: "If just one couple adopts a child after watching their story, they would have helped yet again". Just yesterday, Lisa Salem was named The Philadelphia Inquirer's "Woman of the Week" for her ongoing adoption efforts.

On its Web site, Dateline has the "From Russia With Love" segment set to air on Sunday, May 27 at 7 p.m. Check your local listings and set the VCR, DVD or DVR to record. You'll want to watch this one again and again.

And as you do, remember: The Salems aren't saints. They are regular people. People who just wanted to give some children another chance.