The new gardening catalogs are arriving in force. Nourse Farms, Stark Bros., Seeds of Change, Burpee, White Flower Farm, Breck's, Van Bourgondien …

What does this have to do with adopting from Russia? They all kept me from going over the hedge during my second adoption.

My first adoption, in 1999, moved along faithfully from marker milestone to marker milestone like Thomas the Tank Engine. The agency said I'd have my homestudy approved at three months after I started, and I did. They said I'd get my referral at nine months and travel at twelve. Exactly.

But when I embarked on the second adoption, Russia turned the process on its head. Nothing went according to schedule, and the very idea of a schedule seemed to have been tossed into the Baltic. One delay followed another and, at times, I despaired very deeply that my second son would ever come home. A home that I should note I was reviving after nearly four decades of benign neglect under its previous owner.

And so I did the only thing I could: I got out the pruning shears, the spade and the Swedish bow saw. Russia hesitated, and I cleaned out the flower garden beds. Russia delayed, and I chopped down an old shrub. An entire row of forsythia bit the dust in one day after a particularly bleak call from the agency. And so it went, around the yard. My neighbor balked at lending me his sledge hammer, but I eventually ripped up the aging slate patio, too, cement base and all.

What followed next was the garden equivalent of Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction (and you thought I had learned nothing from two decades as a financial journalist). I opened the plant catalogs and ordered … and ordered … and ordered. The stone yard delivered two truckloads of gravel, and I enlarged and re-laid the patio.

So here's my landscape today--one fig tree, two apple trees, two cherry trees, two gooseberry bushes, two red currant plants, four blackberries, six cranberries, a dozen raspberries and strawberry plants that have spread their tendrils all over. And best of all: Two wonderful kids to eat everything they produce.