Many of you have read, on this site and on others, accounts of what life is like in different parts of Russia. You've read stories about what prospective parents experienced as they traveled through places like Moscow for the first time. What they felt when they saw the town and the orphanage in which their child was living. What they were thinking when they met their child for the first time.

But what if you could see it all yourself?

Thanks to the Internet, increasingly, you can. There are a number of videos made by families adopting from Russia on video sharing sites like YouTube. Jennefer, the brilliantly observant mom who blogs at "Three Sons And A Princess", uploaded a video shot when she and her husband went to pick up their daughter and bring her home. You see a little girl quickly evolve from taking tentative steps in an orphanage hallway to peeking mischievously from behind a hotel chair.

Or there's this video, uploaded by the Primmer family, about their trip to an orphanage in the Moscow region town of Kolomna. At first, there's a bewildered little boy, tentatively turning his head from the caregiver he knows to the strangers. By the end of the video, he's laughing and giving big smiles--to his new parents and the camera. But you can also see a neatly kept, if worn, orphanage and some streetscapes of a town that is not as prosperous as Moscow itself has now become.

Clicking on either one of these videos will lead you to other videos tagged with the words "Russia" and "Adoption" on YouTube, more than 560 if the record count is accurate. (I don't think it is, because some of the adoption videos chronicle visits to countries other than Russia.) And thanks to the site's user rating system, you can which videos have proved most appealing to others.

These are amateur videos, so the picture quality is sometimes iffy. But I was very impressed by some of the clips, which artfully combine still and moving images with sound to tell a story. (Most of the video sharing sites walk newbies through the process of uploading videos; check out YouTube's Help Center page.)

Video probably won't be the only way to tell your adoption story. I don't see it being a big help to chronicle some of the endless waiting that a Russian adoption seems to involve these days. And don't count on taking your video camera inside places like the courthouse for your adoption hearing. But video can, as Jen's blog amply shows, be combined with words to create a new perspective on adoption.