It's a Boy!

Our meeting at the MOE went well and we received our referral. YAY.  He is a boy and we are overjoyed!  Finally our purpose for this trip was going to happen and we would meet our son.

We had a long drive from the MOE to the baby home.  When we arrived we were able to get information on his health and life so far.  After that, we travelled to a local Children's Hospital where we spent about 30 minutes with our little guy.  We didn't have the best conditions for our visit.  We were in a break room type of room with a big table, booth seating and a little bit of space.  When they brought our little guy to us it was a bit unnerving because there were many people around; our interpretor, about 4 nurses and us. 

Our little guy had been woken up from a nap so was a bit groggy at the beginning of our visit.  He was very interested in what was happening and definitely liked the giggling bee we brought.  His eye contact was ok and I thought once I almost saw a smile but not quite.  I so wanted to put him on the floor to see how he could get around.  He's not yet walking and I wanted to get a feel for his gross motor skills.  I am going to push (gently) to see if we can play with him in an environment where he can be on the floor, at least for a few minutes.  I suspect they will have none of this but I'll try tomorrow.

Our visit was very short so its hard to really assess much about his personality but all comments from the caregivers (and our observations) indicate he is fairly laid back and calm, as far as babies go.  We'll see when we are able to spend more time with him.

We will visit him at least one time tomorrow in the late morning and hopefully again in the afternoon.  We can't wait to spend more time with him!

I will post more tomorrow!

Here we go!

Today we are going to the Ministry of Education to receive our referral and after our meeting we will head to the baby home to visit.  We are very excited!

If possible I will post later today but we think we are going to be quite pressed for time given our late start.

Have a great day everyone!

Passing the Time

Time seem to be crawling by.  We're both having a bit of a struggle adjusting to the time change. I stayed up late last night watching The Champ. Anyone remember that movie? It is a real tear jerker, even 30 years later! It probably wasn't the best choice but there isn't a whole lot to choose from.  Bill was up from about 3 - 6am last night and is now sleeping away.


We had one meeting yesterday that went well and now we wait for our referral.  We are hoping that we will get to meet our little one on Wednesday but it may not be until Thursday. 

In the mean time, the plan for today is to sightsee.  Although, its currently snowing outside and looks really cold!    

Hopefully I will get some good pictures today!

We're in Moscow

This is a quick post to say we made it safely to Moscow and have settled into the hotel.  It's so cold here and poor Bill didn't bring a hat!  We hope to find one for him tomorrow but I have my doubts because Spring is coming, or so we're told. 

I'm so happy to be back in this great city and wish we could fast forward to Wednesday (or Thursday) which is when we think we get to meet our referral.

I will post more when I am not so tired and after we really get out and about.

Have a great week!

Quick Update

We're all ready to go, I think.  We received our Visa's on Thursday which was really fast and everything looks good!  We're packed and ready to meet our little one.  We're taking a blanket, teddy bear and photo album to leave behind.  We had so much more stuff last time.  Hopefully we haven't forgotten anything too important.

Bill and I are both totally excited and very optimistic about what lies ahead for us in the coming days.

We think we probably won't meet our referral until Wednesday so aside from a few meetings at the MOE we'll probably spend our time seeing Moscow.

I'm a bit worried about Nick and how he will do with us being gone for so long.  This is the longest we've ever been away from him and I hope he doesn't get too upset.

We've got Nick's first soccer game this morning right before we leave for the airport.  It should be fun!

I will do my best to blog about what is happening while we're in Moscow.

Have a great weekend!

Someone Pinch Me!

Today I received a very surprising phone call from our agency asking whether we could get ourselves prepared to travel next Saturday!  Yes, less than one week away.  I didn't even know we could get Visas that fast.  But as I'm sure many of you know, it is possible.

So, after tearing up just a little bit, I pulled myself together and called Bill to tell him the news.  I couldn't get in touch with him immediately so I tried to concentrate on work.  After what seemed like an eternity I finally had a chance to talk to Bill.  The most important piece of this puzzle was to ensure that we had a good plan for Nick's care while we're gone.  Bill's mom and dad graciously offered to come stay with Nick, so with the main concern under control we were good to go.

I called our agency to let them know we would be able to make it happen.  Our director told us to hold off on making any arrangements until she sent the official dates.  An hour or so later we received the dates and then the Visa Application process began.  Those forms are soooo tedious.  It took at least 2 hours to fill them out and get everything ready to go.  But, we were able to pull everything together and get it all fed ex'd to the Visa expeditors.  I'm glad to have that done, hopefully we didn't make and mistakes in the paperwork.

For the past few hours we have been researching flights and accomodation options.  I think we finally have it all straight!  I am so excited but there is still so much to do before we go.

Nick starts soccer this Saturday and we still need to get some of the gear for that.  In addition, his birthday party is the weekend after we come home which means I need to get the cake ordered before we go.  We also need to purchase some things for the trip, get doctors lined up, special money, and I'm sure a million other things I haven't thought of.

I will try to post again later on this week with an update but wanted to quickly share this great news!

Happy Monday All! 

What's been on my mind...

I'll start with an update and then move on to some things I've been thinking about lately.

We finished our dossier a little over 2 weeks ago and it should be on its way to Russia soon if it isn't already.  We didn't quite finish up as quickly as we had hoped.  Because of the volume of documents, we needed to leave them at the Sec of States office and then picked them up the next week.  All was well and our adoption coordinator had no changes after her review.  This was really great news and if all goes well it sounds like we could get our travel dates some time in March with a trip in April???.  I am over the moon happy about this and hope the timing works out because April is shaping up to be really busy.  So far we have a 10K the first weekend, Nick's birthday party the second weekend and his actual birthday the third weekend.  It should be interesting to see what happens!

In other news, there are two things that have been consuming my thoughts lately.  The first is that I am having a really hard time figuring out how to talk about the pending addition of a brother or sister with Nick.  I think the main reason I'm having a hard time with it is that there is so much uncertainty about timing that I'm worried about setting up expectations with him that could end up taking longer than we think.  I feel like until we meet our future son or daughter, it is less "real" and still a dream.  Nick can get really focused on upcoming events and I suppose my reluctance is for both ours and his sanity.  If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this I would love to hear it.

On the second topic, let me open by saying I really hope this doesn't offend anyone.  I'm just venting and getting things off my chest.  The second thing that I have been thinking about (too much) is my age.  A little background may help give context to my issue.  My mom was 39 when she had me, which at the time (back in the day), was fairly unusual.  But, I was the last of 5 kids with a spread of 18 years between myself and my oldest sibling.  For whatever reason I was very aware that my parents were not really friends with my friends parents and it bothered me (I don't know why, small town...).  In retrospect this was not too surprising, they were 10 - 15 years older than many of them and were in a different place in their lives I suppose.  I chalked up the fact that my parents weren't in the "cool" parents group, to their ages.  Growing up I always thought to myself that I would never be the "old" mom. 

Fast forward to my early 30's and beyond and I realized those things you tell yourself when your a kid are not so easy to control.  Marriage in my 30's, unexplained infertility, and decisions about adoption ate up those precious years and here I am, in my (almost mid) 40's adopting a young child.  So, aside from the normal adoption worries and concerns, I'm worried about fitting in with the other parents.  I know this probably seems silly and superficial to many of you.  I can appreciate that at some level it is superficial, that I should concentrate on what really matters and be happy that I even have this opportunity.  Being a parent and growing our family far outweigh whether I am in the "in crowd" with the moms.  But, this doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

On that note, I will say bye for now.