What are the odds of this: Two positive stories about Russian adoption appearing in the mainstream press on the same day, which just happens to be Mother's Day? I just about fell off my chair this morning when I opened my Google Alerts. I had been reading a very dreamlike sequence in Anna Karenina last night and, looking at the news alerts at 6 in the morning, I had to make sure I wasn't still dreaming.

But it gets even better: One of the children adopted was born on Sakhalin Island, where my little guy was born, and both the moms were older, single moms. I can't attribute the stories to any kind of corporate media directive, since one appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, which is owned by Hearst Communications, and the other was in The Staten Island Advance, a newspaper owned by Advance Communications.

The stories unfolded on opposite coasts of the United States, one on Staten Island (which is one of the five boroughs of New York City) and the other in San Francisco.

According to The Staten Island Advance, Vivan DeLuca was almost 40 when she started her adoption journey. She had been divorced, and was working as a kindergarten teacher. It took her a year and a half to bring her son home from Siberia after she started the adoption in 2004, and she told the reporter the paperwork was "horrendous". Hmmm. Sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? Her son will turn three this week, and the story indicates he is doing just fine.

Also doing quite fine is one Maksim Maksimovich Maksimov. His mother, Dr. Cyril Ramer, brought him to California Pacific Medical Center when he was just two months old--and she was 56. She had met Max, who had a severe cleft lip and palate, on a humanitarian mission, and arranged for her colleagues to repair them. Max just never left San Francisco. The newspaper doesn't say how that was possible, but it says that in a few weeks, Dr. Ramer will finally become the official adoptive mother to the boy she has raised for 15 years. Maksim will become Max Ramer.

Happy Belated Mother's Day, Dr. Ramer and Ms. DeLuca!