I could give you lots of reasons why you should think about adopting from Russia. I could start with the two funny, smart, charming, loving kids who are now my family. I could tell you about some of the other kids who have found forever families with other American parents over the 15 years since Russia opened its borders to international adoption. I could move on to a lot of other reasons, and hopefully, as I write this blog, I will get the opportunity to tell you them all.

But I'm going to start with one thing that sums up all the other reasons that I, or maybe anybody else, could ever give you to convince you to adopt from Russia: 867,800.

It's a number, and a big one at that. It's the total, according to the most recent count by UNICEF, of how many children there are in Russian orphanages right now.

Maybe you've told people you're thinking of adopting from Russia. "Oh," they say, "but don't Russian children have…" and trail off into a long list of maladies.

Yes, some of them do.

But not all, not by a long stretch. Some of them simply have challenges that are easily corrected here, by medical intervention, or positive parenting in a loving forever family. Challenges that kids around you right now deal with successfully every day.

Russian adoptions have gone through a lot of changes in the last three years. I lived, not always happily, through many of them for 18 months as I worked to complete my second adoption. But I think this period of turbulence is drawing to a close, and adoptions will go back to being the smooth course I sailed on my first adoption in 1999.

There are countries with larger orphan populations. UNICEF puts the total in China at 20 million, and at 1.2 million in India. Maybe those numbers are more compelling, and will win your heart in the end.

But for the sake of those nearly 900,000 children in Russia, don't dismiss their country out of hand. Take a moment to read these pages, ask some questions… and then decide.