Ivan Update

My plans to blog daily have been foiled by the technical issues we've had. They are due to a combination of poor Internet service in the apartment and the lack of an adapter that will allow transfer of pictures from my Canon camera to our iPad. We didn't bring the laptop on this trip and thought it would be fine but now to get pictures to the iPad is a major undertaking. We have take pics with the iPhone and then can email them to the blog for posting because the iPad and blogger don't seem to cooperate when it comes to pictures. So these are the troubles. Doesn't sound too bad but. Throw in the poor Internet connection and it can be pretty frustrating.

Aside from our tech difficulties our time with Ivan so far has been wonderful. I didn't mention it before but in our time with Ivan before this trip we had never seen him smile. I would say I was somewhat concerned about that but tried not to dwell on it. We also hadn't seen him crawl or even attempt to crawl. What we've experienced since bringing him home is an easy going, smiley, cuddly little guy who shimmies around on his tummy to get where he wants to be.

I haven't mentioned it yet but Ivan is almost one year old. We are thrilled that we'll be home for his first birthday and will celebrate with friends and family. So the reason I say this is that he is definitely delayed a bit. He doesn't know how to feed himself finger foods yet. We will hold out yogurt melts, puffs or cheerios and he just looks at them. I am making it my mission to teach him that he has the power to put the snack in his mouth but he seems perfectly content to be fed.

He is quite verbal and chatters away at times. He gets very excited at meal times and kicks his legs around until we start feeding him. He seems to like everything we've fed him so far. We're sticking with the canned baby food, yogurt, apple-pear sauce and have moved him onto Milk. So far so good with that!

He is a pretty good sleeper too. Yesterday the embassy doc, Dr. Boris, came to the apartment to do the embassy physical at 7:30am. After he left we walked down to Red Square to take some pictures and to enjoy the gorgeous morning. The weather has been just beautiful. Ivan fell asleep on the walk home and during our stop for coffee. We went out around 1pm to get lunch and again, Ivan fells asleep on the way to lunch and slept right up until we left the restaurant. He finished his nap with me on our bed, too sweet!

Today we go to the Embassy to complete the process for Ivan's Visa. We found out earlier in the week that we would be done with everything by today and that we could leave Friday if we could change our flights. When Bill called yesterday we found out it would cost about $2000 to change the flights to Friday. Needless to say, we're staying till Saturday.

With that I'll say bye for now and will try to post more pictures soon!