Reason to Celebrate, Give Thanks : Family life: A Poway family has opened their hearts to two handicapped Romanian orphans in a commitment that has enriched the entire household.

As if assembling a small boy’s survival kit, Izidor Ruckel hoards things in the bottom drawer of his clothes chest. They’re not the comics or baseball cards prized by most 11-year-olds, but bottles of soft drinks, bananas and the occasional orange.

His mother isn’t worried. She knows of Izidor’s fear that there might not be enough food to eat. She realizes that, just a few short weeks ago, her newly adopted son lived the precarious life of a homeless orphan.

And not just any orphan.

Dragging about his misshapen body--the underdeveloped pelvis, the one leg that is shorter than the other--Izidor had survived most of his young life among the neglected inhabitants of a Romanian home for handicapped children--the Institute for the Unsalvageables.

But all that has changed.

Now, each day Marlys Ruckel and her husband, Dan, reassure both Izidor and Izabela--their disabled 18-year-old daughter adopted this summer from the same faceless institution--that their lives have truly begun anew in the United States.

Along with the Ruckels’ three natural-born children, these two former outcasts have become integral parts of a strange new breed of American family--one with a decidedly multicultural twist.

At the Ruckels’ Poway home, conversations now take place in an oddball combination of Romanian and English. Izidor answers the telephone jabbering in his native tongue, with a “hallo” thrown in for good measure. He keeps a hand-colored Romanian flag on the wall over his bed.

And, when his nervous little-boy antics try her patience, Izabela, who has spent her entire life confined to bed and cannot walk, will often scold him in a quick-tongued burst of Romanian as she looks on from her wheelchair.

“Sometimes, our whole family, we feel as though we’re the ones who were adopted by these two children,” Dan Ruckel said. “In the past few weeks, we’ve learned a lot more Romanian than they have English.”

For the Ruckels, Izidor and Izabela are the fruits of an international gamble that has paid off with sweetly exotic dividends.

With three daughters of their own, the couple had decided to adopt a boy. Their search led them last year to John Upton, an Encinitas filmmaker who had just returned from a child-searching venture to eastern Europe after seeing a network television show about the lives of handicapped Romanian orphans.

After seeing pictures of both Izidor and Izabela, taken at the institute where often half-naked children languished on urine-covered floors in rooms without heat, they had an immediate desire to adopt--to rescue--them.

Although perhaps thousands of Romanian infants have been adopted in recent years by American families, the Ruckels said they found a different standard imposed by the cautious government for older children--especially those with handicaps.

This summer, Marlys Ruckel spent two months in Romania, away from her husband and daughters, ages 13, 10 and 8, in an attempt to persuade a slow-moving Romanian legal system that such physically troubled children were indeed desired in America.

“The judge asked why I wanted to adopt handicapped children,” Ruckel recalled. “I told him that in America, children like this could be helped. In Romania, they were seen solely as unsolved problems. I remember the words of one official who said, ‘These are nobody’s children. For them, there is no hope.’ ”

With the help of several intermediaries, five children were eventually adopted from the orphanage--children who came willingly despite warnings from the institution staff they would be used for body parts and other experiments.

One of the first to leave was Izabela, who would have otherwise been sent to a retirement home on her 18th birthday--too old to remain at the institution.

In August, Izabela arrived at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field and couldn’t understand why her new mother was crying.

Her first words, Ruckel recalled, were uttered in Romanian and loosely translated to “What’s with you?” For Izabela, crying had always been associated with the grayish life at the institution, where her head was always kept shaven and where nurses used duct tape to quiet the mouths of inconsolable children who cried too much.

Within days of her arrival, offers from local doctors came pouring in to help the crippled teen-ager--who is still roughly the size of a 12-year-old, less than 5 feet tall and about 85 pounds. Recently, Izabela had oral surgery to repair her deformed teeth and has been seeing doctors in an effort to help her walk someday.

It didn’t take Izabela long to take to her new family. The hair grew out. She began English lessons, and therapy on her tiny legs. Soon, she stopped insisting on always being in her new mother’s presence--even when Ruckel went to the shower.

Then, three weeks ago--in a delivery that took place at an airport, not a hospital--the Ruckels got their boy.

After six court hearings on his behalf, Izidor landed in San Diego to the cheers of more than two dozen family members and friends of the Ruckelses who were on hand for his long-awaited arrival.

Perched in her wheelchair, Izabela was also there--despite the memories that had almost kept her from coming. Her recollections of the stifling orphanage days when Izidor, less handicapped than many of the others, became a tough-guy ringleader whose directives were expected to be followed.

“He’ll spit on me if he sees me,” Izabela told her new parents.

But Izidor didn’t spit. Instead, he walked up the runway, past the applauding crowd and poked his face inches from Izabela’s mouth to inspect her new teeth. Within minutes, he was already amazed at life in America.

There have, however, been some adjustments to make, Marlys Ruckel recalls. In Romania, Izidor was often allowed to stay up later than the other children and watch “Dallas” on television.

“Izidor thought all Americans were rich--he thought they all lived in big mansions,” she said. “When we got back to our condo, he asked, ‘Where are all the toys?’ ”

At first, Izidor was intent on establishing his independence. He began to regularly correct his new mother’s Romanian when she mistakenly referred to him in the feminine gender.

And he has his own bedroom--the other four girls now share a room--refusing to allow his new sisters inside without permission. “No fatiza!” he tells his mother. “No girls!”

Shortly after his arrival, during an incident on the afternoon she now refers to as “Day 3,” Ruckel began to establish her ground as a mother. She made Izidor wear his seat belt on a family trip.

Sure, he rebelliously unlatched the belt several times before he relented--after Mom gave his hand a few firm taps and he frankly announced that he didn’t love her.

“Then, he started taking things out of his fanny pack and throwing them out the window,” she said. “There we were, driving down the road with the girls yelling out, ‘Mom, he threw his gum out!’ with me saying, ‘Let it go, girls, it’s gone now.’ ”

The styles of her two Romanian children are indeed a study in contrasts, Ruckel says. As the gentle Izabela sits quietly on the couch, staring at her mother in wonderment, telling her constantly in both English and Romanian how much she loves her, Izidor is nonstop action.

The doorbell never stops ringing. That’s because Izidor has developed this habit of parking himself outside with an itchy finger and this wickedly endearing smile.

Shuffling up and down the stairs, dragging along his shorter leg, he takes charge of things. He insists on answering the telephone, often confounding callers with his mix of languages. And, if he jealously doesn’t want his mother to come to the phone, he’s been known to tell callers: “She’s dead.”

The other day, Izidor began scratching his itch for organization. He straightened his mother’s desk and silverware drawer and keeps his own clothes arranged in neatly compartmentalized shoe boxes.

“I always thought it would be so much fun to have a boy--and I thought I was prepared,” his mother said. “I just didn’t know.”

Most often, Ruckel lets her son have the run of the house. All of her children are schooled at home.

As her three natural-born daughters vie for the attention of the placid Izabela--often playing house, with her cast in the role of the doll--the 36-year-old Ruckel spends the day playing international traffic cop in a household where sibling gridlock is an everyday event.

The parents say there has been little jealousy shown by their three daughters. “I am so proud of my kids that my heart is just too big for my chest to hold,” said Dan Ruckel, a computer operator for a local golf equipment manufacturer.

“They know that the two new arrivals have been getting a lot of our attention, and they’ve made some sacrifices. Now my girls speak Romanian around the house. And my 13-year-old, who is of the age where most new teens demand their own rooms, knows that she’s got to room with a horde of other little girls.”

Just when she feels her young family is finally complete, however, Marlys Ruckel must deal with an uncomfortable reality. She has legally adopted Izidor, but there is a chance that Izabela might be forced to return to Romania after her special two-year medical visa expires.

Although she knows Izidor will eventually grow up and leave the family nest, the mother is aware that Izabela is a different story. She has discounted diagnoses by Romanian doctors that her daughter has both cerebral palsy and several emotional disorders, saying she has merely been mentally neglected--and was never taught to read or write.

Ruckel says that, if Izabela is going to remain house-bound the rest of her life, it’s going to be in her house.

“Initially, I thought I could help her for six months or so and then send her back,” she said. “But I didn’t consider a lot of things--like the fact that I was going to fall in love with her.”

She recalled the night soon after Izabela’s arrival, when the girl could not sleep because of pain in her mouth. “When you sit up all night with a child, holding them in your arms,” she said, “they become yours in a way.”

So, for now, the Ruckels are happy with their international family. And their children are happy with them.

For Izabela, the thoughts are expressed with a head on her mother’s shoulder.

With Izidor, however, the emotion comes a bit differently.

“He really likes to wrestle--even if I’m not always in the mood,” Dan Ruckel says. “That’s his preoccupying thought when I come home from work each day, to give me a hug, show me how glad he is to see me--and then try to take me down to the ground.”

But, as usual, Izidor’s true personality surfaces at night.

“During the day, he’s tough as nails,” his mother says. “But at night, when he’s tired and cuddly, he only wants to be loved. And, for once in his life, there’s finally enough of that commodity to go around.”