Our Russian Adoption Adventures

Adoption Meetings and a few photos

2011-04-27T13:51:00.002-04:00

Last week I attended a meeting at the offices of our adoption agency. They have semi-regular meetings on adoption support topics. This meeting was about talking to your kids about adoption. The instructor really emphasized talking to your kids about adoption saying it is never to early to start. Keep it simple at first and as they get older you can give them more information. Basically always be truthful because of how damaging it can be to them should they find out you have not been.

Next week we have a different kind of meeting where we will be taking the kids too and talking to some people who are thinking about adopting and tell them our experiences. I remember when we sat through the same type of information meeting a few years ago.

In the fall we are signed up for another type of meeting where we talk to people who are adopting but still waiting. We will be talking about what we did during our wait to get ready for the kids and about our experiences.

Here are a few photos

Growing up

2011-03-22T09:52:00.005-04:00

Before we came home with the kids we were given a crib, dresser and high chair by another couple adopting who didn't need them. They wouldn't take any money for them and just asked that we pass them along to somebody else in need when we were done. We did that a couple weeks ago. We passed them on to a woman who is also adopting from Russia.

Anna is now sitting at the table with us and has a new bedroom set. We moved her out of the toddler bed that she had passed down to her by Tima not that long ago. She really seems to like eating at the table with us and she definitely likes her big girl bed. She used to join us in our bed on almost a nightly basis usually between 1 and 2am. She has been in this new bed for almost a month now and has not once gotten up in the middle of the night. She seems to be sleeping a lot better in it.

My daily photo blog is still getting a daily post. A lot more pictures of the kids can be found on it plus whatever else I feel like taking a picture of that day. Link is at the top right of this blog and here.

26 / 27 months

2011-03-07T09:34:00.000-05:00

Last month Anna turned 26 months old. She was 13 months old when we picked her up at the orphanage and brought her home. This week she turns 27 months old which means that she has now spent more time in the U.S. than she did in Russia. 27 months old is also how old Tima was when we picked him up at the orphanage. He still has over a year to go before we can say that he has been in the U.S. longer than in Russia.

Shelly and I were talking about it the other day over dinner. Anna at (almost) 27 months has so much more language than Tima did at that same age just fresh out of the orphanage. She can string several words together into 4 or 5 word sentences and she can count to 15 (the number of steps from upstairs). Tima's language now is a lot more developed than hers but at 27 months I don't think he was even close. It was of course all Russian but he only had a few words and based on how quickly he picked up English the problem was no fault of his but how little they worked with him on language. They just don't have enough staff to spend with the kids like we do.

This photo was from my birthday two weeks ago. The kids enjoyed helping open gifts.

Classes

2011-02-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

I added a link over the the right to get to my photo of the day blog. So far so good in that I have taken a photo each day although I do start the day sometimes trying to figure out what I am going to take a picture of. Most of the times it is of the kids. :)

We enrolled the kids in a couple classes last month. They are in a music play class which they were also in last fall and they are taking a painting class. They both seem to enjoy them although when we started the music play last fall Tima did not really like it much at all. The first two classes he actually tried to hide when the instructor started singing and I had to go get him and he sat on my lap the entire time. It took several trips before he actually started enjoying it and did not put up a fuss when I said we were going to music play. Here are a few pictures from that class taken near the end of last fall's session. As you can see Tima is no longer shy and really seems to enjoy the class. Anna is our brave little trooper. She dove in the first day of class and was ready to participate. These photos were taken by one of the other parents in the class.

A new blog

2011-02-03T10:19:00.004-05:00

In December I got a new camera ( a Nikon D700 with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens). I wanted something that would take better pictures of the kids especially in lower light indoor conditions and not have to use a flash which can sometimes washout or give the photo a unnatural look. Since then I have taken over 950 photos with the camera. A lot of those were in December with Anna's birthday and Christmas and then I slowed down a little in January only to start taking a lot more pictures again last week.

I decided to start a new blog. The adoption blog is not going away but I only post here every few weeks so it really does not get a lot of attention. My goal is to post one picture a day on the new blog and for that picture to be taken on the day it is posted. I started it last week and so far so good with that goal. I am thinking with practice I will become a better photographer and I also want to improve my editing skills of the photos. Almost every photo on the adoption blog is straight out of the camera and pretty much every photo has been somehow related to the kids. The new blog will still have a lot of pictures of the kids, they are my favorite subject to photograph, but it will also have other photos too.

There will not be a lot text to go along with the photo. Just a title and then a description of the equipment used (I only have one lens right now), post processing done to the photograph and the settings on the camera used in taking the photograph.

My goal like I said is to take better photographs and to get better at my post processing. If you have time please leave a comment on what you like or don't like about the photos, I really would like to hear what works for people and what doesn't. They won't all be good but hopefully they will get better.

Here is the link: http://my-photo-adventures.blogspot.com/

:)

Family Day

2011-01-25T08:03:00.007-05:00

One year ago today we picked the kids up from their orphanages. If you look at the post from that day you wouldn't know it though. I think it just said something like we had a really great day which it was of course. We were still near the beginning of our 10 day waiting period and we were asked at the time not to say anything since us having them was not the normal procedure for this region. It has been an amazing year for all of us. Both Shelly and I look back at those days in that apartment in Kaliningrad as being so special.

I contacted our regional representative recently to get an address so that we can send some gifts for each orphanage. I think we want to keep up this tradition for a while.

Here are a couple of pictures of the kids from the last month or so.

In this one the kids were sitting next to each other playing with their iPads. They are loaded up with all sorts of learning apps.

Of course they also love good old books too.

Anna in this picture is taking our dog Maggie for a walk.

I stepped out the front door for a second to take a photo and turned around and saw Anna had followed me out. Here she is outside with a little snow falling (minus her coat :( )

post placement and more Christmas and New Years (more Christmas :( )

2011-01-04T13:08:00.011-05:00

We had our second post placement (1 year) visit today. The anniversary of getting the kids is not for three more weeks but we have the report done. Anna was full of energy this morning but overall I think it went well.

I have some more Christmas photos to post. We visited Shelly's family last week getting there on Monday and leaving on Thursday. The kids had fun visiting with grandma and grandpa and got a lot more gifts. Our living room has been a disaster area since Christmas with all the new toys the kids got. These following photos were all from the visit with Shelly's mom and dad.

We then had our traditional New Years eve party here at our house. It is small, my brother and his wife and our good friends Eric and Carol. Eric and Carol brought more Christmas gifts so we had another mini-Christmas with them.

Our first Christmas

2010-12-26T21:03:00.004-05:00

Here are some pictures I took on Christmas day. The kids got a lot of gifts not only from us but from family too. I am not going to write much as we are getting ready to leave this morning to celebrate Christmas with Shelly's side of the family.

I took this picture right after the kids went into the living room and discovered all the presents under the tree. The train on the floor is from the PBS show they watch Dinosaur Train. They played with it for a while before opening any gifts and Tima kept going back to it after almost every gift he opened. He really loves both trains and dinosaurs.

Someday I need to post some video on here. We have a lot of video that nobody but us has ever seen. I was using our still camera and here is Shelly using the video.

Shelly remembers getting a stocking when she was a kid and it was very important to her that the kids get stockings. Here she is passing them out.

Tima playing with the train.

Opening more gifts.

This one looks like Anna is asking if that is all she is getting. LOL

It took over two hours to open the gifts. But that is really because the kids wanted to play with their gifts and were not really looking to open another.

This one is from the afternoon. My side of the family came over and we exchanged gifts. Here is Anna in the middle of things.

And Anna with her cousin. The kids did very well with all the activity and all the people in the house. It was a big day for them.

Anna's Birthday

2010-12-17T10:28:00.007-05:00

Anna's birthday was last week but I have not posted any pictures. Just the four of us celebrated her birthday on the actual day since it fell on a weekday. We had the party on Saturday.

We had cupcakes on her birthday.

I made two cakes for her birthday. Shelly wanted to do an Elmo theme for her birthday and I found a cake pan. This one was chocolate and my first time decorating something like this.

Anna got some help blowing out the candles:

We had the party at a kids museum and this photo was taken at a table that was lit up from below. I liked the light on Anna.

This last one is back home opening gifts.

The party went very well. We all had a really good time.

Happy Birthday Anastasiya

2010-12-09T08:00:00.003-05:00

Today is Anna's birthday and she is turning two. We are just going to have a small family celebration tonight with just the four of us. On Saturday we are having her birthday party and having a number of friends are relatives attend.

Now that Anna is out of a crib she has started getting up a night. The last few nights she has joined us in bed. We have some steps that were originally so our dog could easily get up into bed although she has not done so in a long time. Anna climbs up them and gets under the covers between us and goes back to sleep. Tima has done this in the past and and he is a very restless sleeper. None of us sleep very well those nights. Anna on the other hand cuddles up and sleeps really well.

We have a busy day today so I'll just leave you with this one picture that was taken a couple months ago but I had never posted it for some reason.

Met the kids 1 year ago today

2010-11-22T17:14:00.005-05:00

As the title says we met the kids one year ago today. All of our lives have changed so much from a year ago. It of course has been a great time for us and the kids have come so far in that year. I thought I would post a few pictures from the day we met.

We met Anna first on that day and this is the very first picture I took. She was so scared and was just clinging to Shelly.

One of the first pictures of the three of us is next. This was about as close as she let me get that day.

This picture with her eyes full of tears is how she was much of that day. I think I set it off whenever I got very close to her.

This next picture is one of the first ones of Tima. He was very scared and uncertain at first.

He did settle down pretty quickly and let us read him books which he still loves to do today.

What a big day that was for all of us. It was a long wait getting there but it of course was all so worth it.

Meeting, new bed and Halloween

2010-11-03T09:21:00.009-04:00

Last night I went to another adoption support meeting. It was really good and we talked about transitions. We of course had a transition of sorts a couple weeks ago when we went out for the first time without the kids. Things seemed well when we got home although the kids did have a rough night sleeping but found out that Tima was upset for a while about it. He woke up crying some nights and wanted to join us in bed pretty much every night since we went out. He finally slept the night through last night although it was also the first night in his new bed too.

We decided we better get Anna out of her crib as the day where she climbs out on her own is quickly approaching. She has the strength to do it and she has put her leg over a few times and we are worried she could fall and get hurt. So we moved Tima out of his toddler bed and we are going to put Anna in it. We then bought Tima a twin size bed.

Halloween was a lot of fun. Shelly took some extra time off so that she could go with us to some Halloween events last Friday. Our local library had story time and then the downtown merchants had trick or treating. The kids really seemed to enjoy it although Anna was not really happy about having to put the candy in the bag as she wanted to eat it right away.

Our local paper took pictures of all the kids who came into their offices and these are of the kids from that day.

On Sunday I took them trick or treating around our neighborhood and now between the two days the kids have so much candy it is going to take us a long time to slowly give it to them. It was a lot of work keeping up with Anna she was often running between houses. Tima was getting into character with his tiger costume and growling for people which also spread to Anna who started growling in her giraffe costume. We had some very tired kids that night though as it was a pretty big day for them. Here are a few more pictures from that weekend:

Our anniversary

2010-10-25T10:25:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was our 5 year wedding anniversary and we did something we have not done before. We went out and left the kids at home. This was the first time since we picked the kids up at the orphanage in January that they didn't have at least one of us around.

We went to a movie and then out to dinner. We didn't want to be out too late since the next day was a work day so we left in the afternoon after the kids were up from their naps. Our friends Eric and Carol took care of the kids and have been over several times in preparation in hopes of making it easy on the kids.

We had a really nice time out. We had Martinis (see picture above), which we have not had since the kids have been home. We do go out every weekend to dinner with the kids but a place with burgers, grilled cheese or nuggets are more their speed.

It was really weird to be out without them but it was also nice to have a date night. We have not gone out to a movie together since they have been home or just had a chance to have a relaxing evening. Most of our conversations were about the kids but then I guess that is to be expected.

When we got home the kids were in bed and Anna was already asleep. Tima who always takes longer to go to sleep was still awake so I went and relieved Eric from sitting with Tima. I gave Tima a kiss goodnight and he gave me a big smile and then started to fake snore and pretend like he was already asleep.

They both woke up during the night. Anna cried for a while around 2am and I sat with her for about a half hour and then she was ok for the rest of the night. Tima joined us in our bed for the night. He does not do it very often but last night I think he just wanted to be close to us.

Tima's birthday

2010-10-15T15:42:00.006-04:00

Sunday was Tima's birthday. He turned three. We had the party at a petting farm which I think was a really good decision on our part. We more people than we could comfortably host in our small house and ended up having over 30 people show up.

The kids had a really good time as they both love animals. We saw all sorts of farm animals, took a hayride and the kids got to have a pony ride. Tima who was really nervous about a pony ride when he had one a couple months ago but this time he did just fine.

Here we are on the hayride.

This next one is Tima blowing out his candles. Since we had the party had the party at the petting farm I made the cake with a farm theme. The bottom was chocolate with a cookies and cream filling and the top was a pound cake also with cookies and cream filling. I think both tasted really good. The animals I made on the side of the cake are chocolate. Milk, dark and white chocolate and some food coloring. I dribbled the chocolate on parchment paper and let it harden and put them on the cake.

Here he is on the pony ride. He really did enjoy it this time. The ponies at the last petting farm we went to just walked around in a circle. At this one they actually walk the ponies through a field. Much nicer.

This alpaca is so cute. I think I posted a picture of the kids feeding him from the last time we went here.

Picture catch up

2010-09-27T09:00:00.010-04:00

So it has been a couple weeks and we have been keeping the kids busy. A couple weeks ago my sister had a birthday party for her son at a park. It was a nice day and the kids saw the playground equipment when we drove in and playing at the playground is one of their favorite things to do. Here are a few pictures from that day.

The following week I took the kids to the zoo, it was during the week so Shelly was at work. We have been to this zoo twice before but we still had not seen everything. The kids finally got to see the rest and Tima asked to see the giraffes before we left.

Last week Shelly had to travel out of town. It was just overnight so the kids didn't see her for about 48 hours. We had some nice weather so I took them to the kids play area at the botanical gardens.

There is an area with chalk that the played at a couple of times. We checked out a big boulder nearby and the kids wanted up on it so I had to take a picture. We then went over to the slide which is pretty long and all enclosed. We went for a hike and the kids were holding hands. It is pretty cute when they do that. I didn't prompt them to hold hands Anna just asked Tima to hold her hand.

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birthday party planning

2010-09-07T10:33:00.004-04:00

Next month will be Tima's birthday so we are in the process of planning it now. Anna's birthday is in December so this will be the first birthday for either of them since they have been home.

For Tima's birthday party we rented a room at a petting farm. Now we need to narrow down the guest list a bit as the first go around had probably a few too many (over 60). We are in danger of over doing it I think. At least the party will be at the petting farm so we don't have to worry about setup and cleanup and they provide pizza and drinks we just need to bring the birthday cake.

We went over the weekend to check the place out. The kids of course really had a good time with the animals. Here are a couple of pictures.

Our big trip

2010-09-03T08:23:00.007-04:00

It has been almost a month since I posted last. But we have been busy. We took the kids on a long car trip to visit with Shelly's family. The kids did really well in the car. Shelly sat in the back seat with them and fed them books and when they got bored with that she had them watch the "Sound of Music". It is her go to movie that she puts in for the kids and they do seem to enjoy all the singing.

We stayed at Shelly's parents house and setup a couple cots in our bedroom for the kids so that we were close by. Tima slept really very well and Anna woke up a few times the first couple nights but seemed to do well after that. It was also the first time for her not sleeping in a crib and she did really well with that. One night she did get up out of bed but she went back down very easily.

We kept pretty busy most of the trip. We went to the zoo and the kids were able to get pretty close to a lot of animals (especially some big cats). In this photo the cheetah looks like he is looking right at the kids.

There is a snow leopard in the top right of this photo which you can't make out too well but I really liked the picture of Anna.

Grandpa had a good time with the kids. They did keep him busy though.

The next day we went to the park. The kids love going to the park at home and we thought we would let them explore a couple new parks. Anna loves the swing. She has been known to often swing for a half hour or more at a time.

Tima likes the swing too but he spends more time on the slides and climbing around. Here is is checking out a telescope.

The kids also got to visit their cousin Shannon while she was on duty at the fire station.

The next day we went to a petting farm and the kids got to get up close to some animals. They especially liked the goats and sheep since they were able to get right in with them.

The kids also went on their first pony ride. Anna loved it but Tima seemed a bit nervous and was ready for the ride to end. Once he got off though he asked to go on again.

After the pony ride we visited the goats and sheep again because it was feeding time. Both kids really enjoyed it but I would say Anna loved it. She was really getting in to feeding the goats and at one time climbed up on a platform to get closer to the goats.

The kids also had their first carousel ride.

We celebrated Grandpa's birthday while we were there too. The kids both got a chance to help blow out the birthday candle.

The trip went well. I think we wore the kids out most days though. We were so busy they tended to go down late for their naps and go down late again at night for bed. Most nights they went to sleep pretty fast.

camera phone unloaded

2010-08-05T13:31:00.004-04:00

Ok, I am finally posting again. I have unloaded some pictures off my phone and I thought I would share them. They are not great quality but at least I had my phone with me to get the pictures.

In this first picture we are out to dinner. We are eating outside on a table just outside the restaurant. At this point the kids are coloring which is a great way to keep them busy until the food arrives.

In this photo we are on our way back home after eating out again in town. We live close enough that we can walk to a lot of nice restaurants. On this occasion we had a brush with some celebrities. We saw Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez at a nearby table. Martin even stopped by on his way out and commented on how cute the kids are. In this photo they are "reading" a couple freebie magazines we picked up while eating. A lot of people who passed us on the way home found it funny that they both looked like they were reading.

In this photo we are again downtown but at a live music event. Tima is sporting his new camo sunglasses. He likes to wear them but only for a short time a this point.

In the following picture Tima is helping me take our dog Maggie for a walk. Maggie is 14 1/2 so she is not nearly as fast as she used to be and our pace is rather slow which is perfect for him to be able to walk her.

These next two were taken at the grocery store. They go all the time but this was the first time they were in one of these types of carts. The second picture was taken after somebody else at the store pointed out to us that they were kissing.

In this final picture the kids and I were taking a walk up our street. Anna asked Tima for his hand and they walked holding hands for a while. Just like any brother and sister they don't always get along this well but they sure have come a long ways since the first few days when they did not get along well.

A few pictures from our family photo shoot

2010-07-23T08:48:00.004-04:00

My brother and his wife (she is the photographer) came over last month and she took a bunch of pictures of the kids and us. She has been working as a photographer for many years now and she took our wedding pictures a while back. She is now starting her own photography business.

These first two are of the kids in the outfits I bought for them while in Moscow. I was told they were traditional Russian outfits.

She also took some pictures of the four of us together on the bed.

We have a bunch more pictures from her too and we are just trying to figure out which ones we are going to have printed and framed. I think the black and white one of the family for sure and then probably some of just the kids.

First post placement report

2010-07-17T10:34:00.002-04:00

We had our first post placement report this week and it went very smoothly. We were asked to answer some questions about the kids and provide eight photos of each child with at least one photo being of the entire family. We have so many pictures of the kids it was just a matter of finding the ones I wanted to use. I used mostly pictures already posted on the blog and then a few that my sister in-law took a couple weeks ago. I have not posted those on the blog yet but I will get to them in a new post in a few days.

Next week will be the 6 month anniversary of our court date. The kids have come so far in that short time and they are both doing so well. Our next post placement report is in 6 months.

I'll do a picture post in a couple days, my keyboard is acting kind of funky today and needs replacing so that is all for today....

Our July 4th weekend

2010-07-08T13:56:00.008-04:00

We had a busy July 4th weekend. On Saturday we took the kids to see fireworks. The fireworks were suppose to start at 9:45 but the crowds are big at the park we went to so we arrived around 6pm. We found a place to park our stroller, blanket, chairs and other gear and then I took the kids for a walk. I took just one at a time and the other one hung out with Shelly.

I first took Tima and we walked over to the playground area. We took our time since we had a lot of time to kill. It was crowded but it didn't seem to bother him much. He ran out ahead of me but would stop and look back before getting too far. He always wanted to know where I was.

A little while later I took Anna on the same walk. She also shot out ahead like Tima did but she never looked back. I was never far from her but she just went off exploring. Again the crowds were pretty big but that did not seem to bother her. At one point she walked around for at least 15 minutes without looking back once. I was close by but she didn't know that she just kept going and going.

The fireworks were very nice and Tima seemed to enjoy them. He sat on my lap and he said wow many times while watching them. Anna on the other hand was scared. She was with Shelly and she did not like all the noise one bit. I don't think she relaxed and enjoyed the fireworks at all.

On Sunday we went to a parade. We live near town and we just walked downtown with the kids. It was very hot and I don't think they liked waiting around for the parade to start at all. Once the parade started though Tima seemed to like it a lot. Anna was initially scared by the loud sirens of the firetrucks and police cars. She eventually settled down though.

On Sunday afternoon we had some family over and had a little cookout. It was a busy weekend for us but the kids did really well.

Here are a few pictures. While waiting for the fireworks Tima blew some bubbles. The boy loves bubbles.

Anna hanging out with Shelly. We still had a ways to go before the fireworks started at this point.

Here is a photo for Uncle Mike. He seems to like ones where Tima is wearing a hat. Here Shelly is letting him try on her hat.

These next few were all taken at the parade. The kids with their flags:

These two are of Anna with her balloon. Tima got one too but he didn't want it to be tied to his arm so he lost his very quickly.

Shelly and Anna watching the parade go by. This was near the end of the parade I think.

This last one is of my Uncle Guenter. Shelly found this kids chair while walking the kids. Somebody had a sign that said free so she grabbed it. Tima likes it. :)

Shelly has been out of town

2010-06-25T21:51:00.005-04:00

Shelly had a conference this week and she left Wednesday morning for it. Tima was up early and saw her very briefly but Anna has not seen her since Tuesday night. They will see her tomorrow (Saturday) as she gets back into town tonight but they are already in bed.

She does not travel often for work but this trip was the longest time she has been away. The first trip was just a day trip a couple months ago, then she had a two day trip and now this one. The kids get very excited when she calls in to talk to them. She was able to do a video call over Skype and they got to see her too. With me being a stay at home dad they are used to spending most of the day with me anyways so they did not really seemed to be too stressed about it. They do miss her though and will be very glad to see her tomorrow. I am glad she is coming home. I really do enjoy all the time I get with the kids but it is nice to have a break even if it is just an hour or so when Shelly gets home from work each night.

Here are a couple pictures from the last couple weeks. These first two were of the kids wearing a couple Shrek hats that my dad brought us. The kids have no idea who Shrek is they just like wearing the funny looking hats. They are adult hats so they don't really fit but they really liked them.

These next two are from last weekend. My mom was over and we were celebrating her 77th birthday. The kids really do like hanging out with grandma. We went out to dinner and then we went to the park and she got to see them run around the park for a while.

These last four pictures were taken with my phone. It is nice to always have a camera with me even if it does not take the best pictures. We were at a car dealership a couple weeks ago picking up my new car and Tima was trying out a new GMC pickup. It was very nice.

This one is Tima in our backyard. It was one of the first photos I took with my new phone and I was just testing things out.

The last two are from last weekend. We went hiking in the woods after dropping off my old vehicle at the dealership. The kids had a lot of energy to start with and were pretty tired by the time we were done. They fell to sleep really fast that night.

My first fathers' day

2010-06-21T21:42:00.008-04:00

My first father's day was very nice. We took the kids to the zoo again since they seemed to really enjoy it the first time. We spent the morning there and we saw penguins, otters, reptiles, amphibians, birds and butterflies in the butterfly house. We also spent a lot of time in a playground that they have at the zoo.

In the evening we walked into town and had a nice dinner at a local brew pub. We used to do this all the time but we have been slowly working our way up to it with the kids. When we first brought them home they did not have the patience to sit in a restaurant and wait for the food. Now they do a lot better so going out with them is a lot easier.

Here we are just after arriving at the zoo.

We spent some time at the butterfly house. Strollers were not allowed so the kids got to stretch their legs for a bit. I thought they might like the butterflies since they point them out when we see them flying around the house. Tima enjoyed getting up close to them.

We spent a lot of time at the playground since the kids really seemed to be enjoying it.

This last one is a video of Anna climbing a rope ladder at the playground. I took the video with my phone so it is not the best quality but you will get the idea. She was barely walking in January and now she is running and climbing like crazy. I think having an older brother motivates her a lot. She is also tall for her age (75th percentile) so a lot of people think she is older than 18 months. (You will need to click on it to see the video) :)

Day at the zoo

2010-06-12T13:35:00.003-04:00

We took the kids to the zoo a couple weekends ago and I finally got the pictures off the camera today. They both really love animals and we hoped they would enjoy seeing all these animals that we were looking at in their books in person. I bought a membership to the zoo so we can go as often as we like and I will take the kids during the week now but I waited for the weekend for our first trip so Shelly could go too. We saw maybe a third of the zoo before we had lunch and then had to go because the kids were getting tired.

Anna gets really exited to see some animals:

It was a nice sunny day and we saw all sorts of animals:

Language

2010-06-09T14:30:00.003-04:00

We had a question a couple posts ago about what we did for language for the kids. Tima made it easy. From the first day we met him he would point to things in books and asking what they were and the same once we had him in the apartment in Russia he walked around the apartment pointing at things. Anna was not saying anything in Russia but she did like to play games where she and I would make sounds with each other. She liked to copy different noises I made.

We read to the kids every day. It is always part of their bedtime routine. The books we started with had mostly pictures. I think one of Tima's favorite books was a book called first 100 words. We went through that a lot in the beginning. And for books in general he really didn't care about having them read to him at first, I am sure because he didn't understand what we were saying. We just looked at the pictures and told him what each thing was. He wanted the pages turned pretty quickly and that is how Anna is now for the most part. I remember when he first let me actually read a book to him. I think at that point the words were actually starting to make sense.

Shelly and I are generally not big talkers but we both try to talk more to the kids and verbalize what we are thinking or doing with them. The more words they hear the better. So while I am making dinner for example I will tell them what I am doing at each step.

They both continue to add more words to their vocabulary . Anna just uses one word at a time but Tima uses two or more together now. Today he used four words together for the first time. It really is cool to see their language develop.

No pictures today. I'll put up a picture post later in the week.

Busy Weekend

2010-05-26T12:52:00.007-04:00

We had a busy weekend. On Saturday my sister had a birthday party for her two year old daughter and on Sunday our neighbors had a party to welcome the kids to the neighborhood. Both were a lot of fun.

They did not want to leave the birthday party and Tima got a little upset about having to go home as he was having a good time. Even though we got home around their bedtimes the kids still were very much on the go. It took them a lot longer to get to sleep than usual. We have seen them have trouble getting to sleep after going out to dinner or something like that before so it was really of no real surprise that they would have a hard time doing so after a birthday party. A change in the routine and they take longer to go to sleep. Other than that though I would say things went very well.

Here are some pictures from the birthday party:

Many of the neighbors on our street showed up on Sunday to the party that was given in the kids honor. It was very nice and I think the kids had a good time too. They had met many of our neighbors already but it was nice to spend some more time with them. The kids mostly ran around until a few of the older kids showed up later and then they played with them.

On Monday we had a play date with a bunch of other kids around their ages. It was at a botanical garden and they have an area setup just for kids. While the kids played a lot on their own or with each other they did play a little with the other kids too. This was their first play date and I think as they get to know the other kids they will play a lot more with them.

This picture is of Tima playing with some shipping tubes right before dinner a couple days ago. He was having a good time with them.

These pictures were taken yesterday. The kids were helping water the plants. They also ended up getting a lot of water on each other.

Update time...

2010-05-21T06:31:00.004-04:00

Wow, I didn't realize it has been almost a month since I last posted. We are in our day to day routine but things are still going on. I need to find more time to post.

I took the kids to Early-On and had them evaluated. It was recommended in one of our adoption support meetings we went to a couple years ago. I took them about three weeks after we got home and then for a follow up last week. They are evaluated in a number of areas including motor skills and language. While the first visit was pretty early on it gave us starting point. The only thing they were really worried about after the first visit was language but then they had only been home a few weeks at that point so they should be behind. After the visit last week we ticked off language as a concern as both seem to be coming along well. So we don't have any more meetings with them since they feel the kids are either preforming at or near the level they should be and in several cases preforming well ahead.

This weekend will be busy. My sister is having a birthday party for her 2 year old girl and it will be the biggest gathering the kids have been to. I think at least one of my cousins will be coming too so they will get to meet her too. It should be fun.

On Sunday one of my neighbors is hosting a welcome to the neighborhood party for the kids. They have been planning on doing this for a while but was giving us time to settle in. The kids have met most of our neighbors already since we walk the dog everyday and they run up and down the sidewalk on our street but it will be nice to spend a little more time visiting.

Here are a couple pics of the kids.

Veggies

2010-04-22T13:43:00.005-04:00

One of our concerns with the kids is making sure they are getting the right foods to eat. With Anna it is pretty easy. She is not real picky and can really pack the food away. I think she out eats Tima at a lot of meals. She will eat vegetables and fruit no problem. She really seems to like just about anything.

Tima on the other hand can be very picky. While he will eat most fruits, he does not like vegetables. We can get him to eat tomato soup or something with a tomato sauce but that is it. He gets a multi-vitamin but that is not really going to cut it. So we sneak them in.

We buy the V8 juice that has vegetables and fruit in it and they both really like it. They also both love yogurt and we have been getting yogurt that has both fruit and vegetables in it too. We have found a couple brands yo-baby and little blends by Horizon. They seem to like both very much. I also bought a couple cookbooks from The Sneaky Chef series.

I have so far made a several things from these cookbooks and the kids do like them. The idea is basically to puree vegetables and incorporate them into the food that way. So for example the meatballs that I made had a puree of broccoli, peas and spinach in it. The meatballs do end up being a little green in color but they taste very good. The kids eat them up.

Here are a couple pictures. This first one is of both kids and their new tricycle. We got some money as a gift and bought the kids this bike.

This last one is of Tima in Anna's highchair. She had finished breakfast and had left behind some fruit and yogurt on her tray. He was making sure none of it went to waste. He had not sat in her chair before and seemed to like it.

Easter update - Finally

2010-04-15T12:54:00.005-04:00

I am finally getting around to posting our Easter pictures. We had our parents over for Easter and this was the first holiday we celebrated with the children and our families. We tried to keep it as small as possible so we only invited our parents. My Mom had met the children once before and Shelly's parents came up for the first time a couple days before Easter.

This first picture is Shelly's mom with Tima. He warmed up to both of them very quickly and wanted to sit on their laps often.

These next two are from Easter morning and are of the kids with their Easter baskets.

The final two pictures are my of my dad playing with Tima and Shelly's dad helping Anna play catch.

The kids really did enjoy the time with their grandparents.

Boy sent back to Russia

2010-04-13T16:32:00.003-04:00

Just a quick post here and I am sure most everybody knows the story of the boy sent back to Russia by his mother. The joint council for international children services is trying to organize a campaign to let the Russian and U.S. governments know just how isolated of an incident this was and how so many children go to good homes all the time. They are approaching this issue in a number of different ways you can find out more here: JCICS

Our little droids

2010-03-30T14:28:00.005-04:00

Just a quick post. The kids are doing well.

Remember the droid from star wars that looked like a walking trash can? If not here is a drawing I found on the web.
Well the kids were playing with their laundry baskets and they reminded me of that droid. I had to take a couple pictures

Here are a couple pictures of Tima. The boy loves hats. A woman Shelly works with made the kids a sock monkey and Tima removed it's hat and scarf and was wearing it. The hat just barely stays on as it is entirely too small for his head. He still wore it though when we took the dog for a walk around the neighborhood.

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Busy Busy Busy

2010-03-23T14:21:00.006-04:00

I know it has been a couple weeks since my last post. I have been meaning to post but I have just not been able to find the time.

I went to a meeting hosted by our adoption agency a couple weeks ago. The topic was sleep since sleep can be a big issue with children and how you handle sleep issues is very important. Since the meeting I have really being trying to keep the lights down low when we are getting close to bedtime and also keep things low key. We want to do things that don't involve a lot of running around and do more things like reading or just getting ready for bed activities like using the potty and brushing their teeth. Some nights it works better than others. Tima can take and hour or longer to go to sleep although last night he was asleep in about 15 minutes which is really good for him.

I also took Tima to the allergy doctor. We were told in Russia that he had food allergies to fish, milk, eggs, strawberries and citrus. He was tested and it turns our that he is not allergic to any of those foods. So as of right now we don't think he has any food allergies.

Last weekend we had my Mom come over to visit the kids. We have been going really slow with things and this was her first visit. My Dad is coming this weekend and Shelly's parents and my parents are coming over for Easter. We have a video camera on our computer and we use it to talk with our parents and a few other relatives. I think Tima must have recognized her because he warmed up to her quickly a lot more quickly than he does to most new people.

Here are a couple pictures from the last couple weeks. The first one is of the two of them playing with their diner. It continues to be a good gift. They play with it a lot.

The next picture is also of them playing with the diner. I draped a sheet over the diner and couch and it was like an all new toy. They played for a couple of hours with it that day.

The last ones are of Tima wearing his diaper hat. The boy loves to wear hats and he came back from using the potty right before dinner wearing a diaper on his head. I guess we can save money on hats for him.

Week one done

2010-03-06T09:48:00.008-05:00

So the first week of Shelly being back to work is done. For the most part things went pretty well. I have been moving Anna's nap time closer to Tima's so that they both have their naps at the same time. Anna was having an early nap and then a later one but she has never gone down easily for the later one.

Part of what made this week easy can be seen in the following picture. I no longer need to vacuum the house. The boy has been trained. He does like to clean, if you give him a rag after he spills something he cleans up his own mess.

Shelly had a baby shower at work on Thursday. The kids got a lot of gifts. The big gift was a 50's diner set and was delivered during the day by FedEx. It really is a great gift. We have been buying them a lot of educational type toys and they need something for their imagination. As can be seen Tima is practicing his cooking skills (yes not long and I can turn the kitchen over to him too). They both have spent a lot of time playing with it.

When Shelly got home she had a carload of more gifts. The kids got really excited as she brought in more and more gifts. Tima has been saying Papa since the first few days and in the last couple weeks has started saying "look" and pointing at what he wanted us to look at. I heard his first two word sentence when Shelly brought in the gifts. He said "Papa look" several times. Anna was also having a good time with the balloons that Shelly brought home.

The following pictures is of a sock monkey that was hand made for them. After we had dinner Tima took the sock monkey to the new diner and fed him his dinner.

We put some of the gifts on the shelf and we will be giving them out over the next week or two rather than overload them with a ton of toys at once. They also got a lot of books and they have both been enjoying them. Just this week Anna started bringing us books to read. Before that her only interest in books was to rip pages out of them. Now she likes to look through books with us and will bring us books to read.

Shelly is back to work

2010-03-02T14:29:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was Shelly's first day back to work. So I am now on my own with them all day. They did well yesterday. Very well as a matter of fact. It was really a pretty easy day. We have our routine of meals and naps and while I don't really get a break during the day since they are on different nap schedules I do have a fair amount of time with just one or the other.

If we had not had all that time of Shelly being off though I am sure it would have been a different story. Those first weeks we were both so tired all the time. They do take a lot of work but now that we have our routine down it is a lot easier.

Over the weekend we had our first visitors since we have been home. Our friends Eric and Carol came by for dinner. The kids stuck close to Shelly for a bit until they felt more comfortable with strangers in the house. After that they both seemed to warm up to them very well. They especially seemed to have fun playing with Carol. It was a good visit and the kids both did well. We were a bit worried as neither had their normal naps that day which can be the difference between cranky kids and happy ones but they both did well.

This Saturday one of Shelly's friends is going to host a baby shower for Shelly. The kids may make a brief appearance depending on how they are doing that day.

Swimming

2010-02-25T11:00:00.003-05:00

We took the kids to the YMCA yesterday and got them in the pool. The YMCA is fairly new and they have a very nice facility. They have a pool the kids can wade into and it very gradually gets deeper.

Shelly had Anna and she carried her right in and did pretty well. She seemed a bit concerned about the water at first but I think all the time the kids spend in the bath helped her a lot.

Tima waded in and got about ankle deep and then he was not so sure. He backed off for a while so we just hung out for a bit and looked at the pool. After a while I carried him in and had him sit on the edge of the pool with his feet hanging in. I splashed some water on him which he always finds amusing in the bath and he liked it at the pool too. It didn't take long and he was in the water.

They both seemed to enjoy it. Although Anna got very upset when either Shelly or I went underwater. I am not sure if she didn't like how we looked when we came out with our hair all wet or if she didn't like seeing us go underwater. Tima I think found it more amusing.

After swimming we took them out to dinner. We have taken them to McDonald's before which is easy because you don't have to wait for food and dinner does not take long. The place we went last night has a lot of variety on the menu and is reasonably priced. They both did pretty well although Anna got a bit tired of the experience at the end and she and Shelly left for the car while Tima and I waited for the leftover food to be boxed and to pay for things. He did well, although he had enough food leftover that he will have it for lunch today.

The first month

2010-02-24T11:39:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow will be the one month anniversary of the day we picked our kids up. They have made such great progress in this month.

The first day we brought them to the apartment in Russia Tima who is so shy hardly said a thing. You could tell he was wondering exactly what was going on. Today though the kid babbles on non-stop. He has started saying a few words in English but much of what he says is still either Russian or Tima-speak. While we don't know what it is he says much of the time we do recognize several words. He now asks for his diaper to be changed and has started asking to go to use the potty. He often loses focus when he gets to the potty but he has started asking to go.

While he has picked up a few words the one we finds most amusing is when he says his sisters name Anna. He shouts it and the way he says it you would think he is cursing. We find it very amusing.

We still struggle with getting him to eat his vegetables. We did find out a couple days ago that he likes tomato soup. He also had a grilled cheese sandwich that day and he would not eat it, I think it was because it was cut up for him into bit size pieces. When we gave him a grilled cheese sandwich that was not cut up though he dug right into it. He can be very cautious with foods he does not recognize.

He really likes to cuddle with us now too. Understandably we were still pretty much strangers to him when we picked him up a month ago and then he really did not enjoy being close. Now he will cuddle up on our laps our or lay down across us when we are sitting with him.

Anna has also come a long ways in this first month. Her walking which was so unsteady at first has really come along. She can motor across the floor pretty quickly. She can with some help go up and down a couple steps.

At first it was very difficult to comfort Anna. When she was upset and it really did not take a lot to set her off those first few days she really did not want us to comfort her. She took a fall today and immediately looked for Shelly and came to her for comfort. She would not have done this a month ago.

Just in the last week she has started eating better. She initially did not want to eat anything with any texture. If the food was not completely smooth she did not want it. We have found she likes to feed herself and does a lot better when given food that she can do that with. Last night she had pasta (cut up small) and she fed herself and did very well and demanded a second helping.

Anna's hair has been getting thicker too. When we first picked her up it was so thin and looked very light colored. Now her hair is getting thicker and a lot more brown. Possibly the change in diet has brought her true colors out.

Today I actually sat with both on my lap for a while. Which was a first. Sometimes when you are holding one the other one wants to be in your lap too. They just don't usually like to share a lap though and want us all to their own. They are on different nap schedules which is nice and gives them each time to spend with us without the other.

Here are a couple pictures from this past week. In this picture Tima has a cloth bucket on his head that he is wearing like a hat. Anna in her typical fashion is blocking his way.

In these next two photos they are opening presents they got from our friends Diane and Jewells. They got a couple of really cool bears that could be customized via a USB port for each of them. They also got a CD with some children's songs by the barenaked ladies. Very nice gifts, the kids really do like them.

Monday was my birthday. We had a nice dinner at home and finished dinner with some cupcakes. The kids split one. Anna dug right into hers and really seemed to enjoy it. Tima took a different approach. He first picked off the sprinkles on the cupcake and then ate the frosting and just a couple bites of the cake itself.

We have been very busy with the kids so the posts have slowed down. Next week Shelly goes back to work and my days will be getting just a little more crazy. I think we have had a good month though and I hope the kids do ok with the adjustment. I am sure they will miss seeing her during the day.

food

2010-02-18T11:52:00.002-05:00

Timofey (Tima) and Anastasiya (Anna) are very different when it comes to food. Tima gets very excited about eating. He even has a little dance he does when we bring out his bib. On occasion though he can have a melt down if it is taking us too long to get dinner ready and feeding Anna before him upsets him too. He eats the foods he likes very well and he seems to like most anything except for vegetables. The boy loves meat and usually wants extra helpings. We have yet to find a vegetable that he likes.

Anna on the other hand his hit or miss with food. She usually likes her food very smooth. If you give her something with much texture to it she spits it back out. Put the same thing in a blender and she eats it. She is getting better though. Last night I made a pot roast and put carrots, potatoes and onions in it while it cooked. She loves carrots and she ate both the carrots and potatoes without us having to mush them up, they were both fairly soft after cooking for so long but she usually does not like stuff that isn't really blended. Tima loved the pot roast, he tried both the carrots and potatoes but was not impressed with either. We will keep working on finding a vegetable he likes.

our routine

2010-02-15T14:44:00.003-05:00

I think we have our daily routine established. The last few days the kids have been able to sleep through the night and are not waking up early. I think they are finally adjusted to our time zone.

They are waking up around 7:30 each morning. Although this morning I woke up to hear a door closing and then I could hear Anastasiya happily babbling in her room. I went to check on them and found Timofey was not in his room so I checked on Anastsiya and he had gone in her room and closed the door. He was happily playing and so was she. While she was still in her crib in had given her several toys and a book and they were both happily playing on their own.

The first few days we had them in Russia they seemed to really want all the attention we could give them. They played very little on their own and wanted us to play and spend time with them. While they still love for us to play with them and they both have a lot of fun with us they now also enjoy their solo play and are starting to play a little with each other.

Some of the simplest things can be so much fun. Timofey in this picture plays with the packing material from a box that we received from Amazon. The box itself he filled with toys as if it was a toy box. The packing material was just a long piece of paper and he played with it for a long time.

Flying Solo

2010-02-11T07:42:00.004-05:00

Shelly and I have had the flu or some sort of stomach bug. I was at my worst on Monday and Shelly was really out of it yesterday. She spent nearly the entire day in bed. That means I got the entire day with just me and the kids. Since I am going to be a stay at home dad it was good practice. We had talked about working Shelly out of the house over the next few weeks so the kids get used to her not being around we just got an early start to that.

We actually had a very good day. Our big problem since we have been home is the kids seem to not be adjusting to our time zone well. They wake up early and sometimes have a harder time getting down for their naps. This can make for some cranky kids. Yesterday on the other hand when I was flying solo they slept in later and both had a good nap. So I got some kids who were really in a pretty good mood all day. Lucky me.

On Monday we took the kids to their pediatrician. We found him before we went to Russia and had the appointment setup so he could do his initial review of them when we got home. We both really liked him. We decided on him because we saw in his profile that he has an interest in international adoption. He called us and talked to us before we went to Russia and he had several suggestions. It was very clear on Monday during our appointment that he was very familiar with issues with internationally adopted children and we had a very good conversation with him. We have some other tests setup. We were told that Timofey has some food allergies so we are going to find out if he really does.

We have been told that children can be initially afraid of new strange sounds in the home such as a vacuum or hair dryer. This picture illustrates the their fear of a running vacuum. I missed out on a good picture though when Shelly told me too look Anastasiya was trying to ride the vacuum as it was running. To this point they really don't seem to have an issues with unusual sounds.

First full day

2010-02-08T07:48:00.006-05:00

So yesterday was our first full day with the children at home. We had a nice day with them. They went to bed around 4pm Saturday after we got home and fed them and slept until 5am Sunday morning. They must have been really tired. We are working on getting them adjusted to the new time zone but is is a seven hour difference from Kaliningrad.

Our first task of the day after getting them fed was I needed to go get our "Fur Kids" as my mom calls them. She was taking care of them while we were in Russia. We have a dog and two cats. This picture is Timofey's initial reaction to our dog Maggie. He was very interested as was Anastasiya. Their first meeting went well. Anastasiya started crying the first time she heard Maggie bark but she got used to it pretty quickly.

We plan on keeping the kids separate from the pets for awhile. Even though our dog is good with them we want to make sure everybody gets along. Timofey seems to do well with her but Anastasiya we have to keep an eye on. So we keep Maggie on the other side of the gate except for short supervised visits. She is already figuring out that the kids drop food on the floor and Timofey has offered her some animal crackers so I think in the long run they will do fine.

Here is Timofey checking out the table and chairs he got from Grandpa and Grandma and Timofey and Anastasiya checking out the scooter that they got from them too.

In this photo Timofey is enjoying some Lasagna that our friends Eric and Carol dropped off for us. He really liked it and wiped it out very quickly.

We finished the day by turning the TV on. It was after all the Super Bowl and what could be better for a boy and his dad to watch together? Dad and Timofey cheered the Saints on to victory.

Our neighbor Laura dropped off some very yummy pasta yesterday afternoon. So we didn't have to cook once again. We have received so much support from everybody, we are very grateful.

We are home

2010-02-06T17:53:00.002-05:00

We made it home. The kids are so tired. We had to get them up at 2:45 am Moscow time in order to make our flight. They both managed to fall asleep on the Moscow to Amsterdam flight for about two hours. But they did not get much sleep on the 9 hour flight home from Amsterdam.

They did pretty good until we were about 2 hours from landing and then the long day finally caught up to Timofey and he finally had enough. It took some time for us to calm him down. We both walked him up and down the aisles and Shelly finally managed to get him settled down.

We had a bunch of great people around us though. And we got a lot of help carrying some of our coats and stuff off the plane an up to immigration by one of our fellow passengers who had also adopted internationally.

We made the kids some porridge and then Timofey managed to break in his new potty in a big way. He started off good using the potty in Russia but seemed to slip a bit. It was good to see him back in the potty grove.

They both love porridge and it was something they ate a lot of at the orphanage so to ease the transition we have tried to keep that as part of their routine. I even packed a couple boxes so we will have some here. It won't last long so I need to find something new here in the states to replace it. Anybody out there have any ideas?

The kids are sleeping right now. Timofey really had a hard time getting to sleep. He wanted to explore his room and look out the window. He usually struggles getting to sleep as it is but he seemed so excited about his room it took even longer to get him down.

A big thank you to our friends Eric and Carol for meeting us at the airport. They also had stopped at our house and dropped off some fresh fruit and some lasagna. The lasagna was awesome and it was really nice not to have to think about what to make for dinner after the long day.

Packing our suitcases

2010-02-05T09:38:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note. We are packing and getting ready to come home. We have a very early flight so our Alex will pick us up at 3am so we won't be getting a lot of sleep tonight. We are afraid this could make for some very cranky kids. Hopefully they will be able to sleep on the flight but we have heard stories of children being awake for the entire trip.

Our trip to the embassy today went well. They asked us a few questions and had us sign some paperwork and then we just waited for the children's visas to be generated. They gave us back their Russian passports and all the paperwork we had dropped off on the children and they had translated some of the documents we gave them that had been in Russian. We also got the official paperwork we need to give to U.S. Immigration when we get back home and a warning not to open the envelopes with their paperwork or else we would have problems.

I never realized how many of the people at the U.S. embassy would be Russian. I guess to bring U.S. citizens over for all the jobs would be very costly. So everybody I dealt with yesterday was Russian including all the security staff. The woman who interviewed us and handle all the paperwork today was American but she was the only one in the last two days.

There were three other families adopting today. In general the kids were very good. We did have to wake them up from their naps though as we had to leave at 1pm to make it to the Embassy on time.

Our next post will be from home... :)

Our afternoon in Moscow

2010-02-04T14:14:00.004-05:00

Today we went for a long walk with the kids. We wanted to take them down to Red Square and get a few photos of them for their photo album. The only problem is that it took a lot longer to get there than planned as Moscow had a pretty good snow yesterday and things were still slippery so it slowed us down some. Maybe doing that walk in February with two children in strollers is not a real smart idea.

We walked the length of Arbat street twice (once going and then coming back). Arbat street is closed to cars and is a shopping area. Many of the shops seemed to be geared towards tourist. We didn't have time to shop though.

All the busy streets in Moscow have underground walkways / tunnels. This would have been great if it had been just the two of us but once you add the kids and their strollers it was not easy getting them down the stairs and back up again on the other side. I think there were 4 or 5 streets we had to cross that way each way.

We did make it to red square but by that time the kids were getting cranky with being outside so long and were tired and hungry. We did take some photos of them both crying with St. Basil's Cathedral in the distance. Not a great addition to their photo album though. :( We decided they had enough and didn't see anymore and get all that close, if it had been just the two of us we would have pushed on but we needed to get the kids someplace warm and get them something to eat. What we did see though was beautiful.

We took the kids to McDonald's for their first fast food experience with us. Everybody says how much kids like the food. Timofey was a bit cautious though. It took him a while to warm up to eating some Chicken McNuggets and he refused to give french fries a try.

Normally Timofey is a good eater. As a matter of fact I say he may have a future in competitive eating. If you don't watch him he can stuff a lot of food in his mouth. But yesterday on the flight and today at McDonald's he suddenly did not want to try anything. I am guessing he was not comfortable with the setting and if had the same food in front of him at a familiar place he would have chowed down.

Here are a few photos I took from today's outing:

St. Basil's Cathedral:

red square:

State history museum:

In Moscow

2010-02-04T01:21:00.006-05:00

We safely arrived in Moscow last night. The plane flight was not a lot of fun. We thought we would have problems with Anastasiya because she is our little drama queen and can be fussy (she is teething and has a big personality as well). She did great though. Timofey, on the other hand, had problems with his ears especially going up. We gave him snacks to help him clear his ears but he cried several times as we went up.

We brought a couple of jars of baby food and attempted to feed the kids on the flight. Anna chowed down on her peaches but Timofey would not have anything other than cookies and Cheerios. In fact, while I was trying to give him some apricots, he kicked the the little tray table and the open jar of apricots went flying. Fortunately, we were seated in the bulkhead, which may have been strategic on the part of the airlines, so there was a wall in front of us and not passengers. After that, he sat in my lap for a good part of the trip but as we approached Moscow he had to return to his seat. He acted as if he was being punished and cried for at least 10 minutes - big cry! We finally were able to calm him down by playing with the overhead lights, turning them on and off. As well, we played a finger game with him which kept his interest for maybe 5 minutes. Once we landed and were taxing to the gate, I pulled him on my lap and he calmed down again while watching all of the lights on the runway.

We were very slow to get off the plane, actually the last ones. We did not expect that there would be a bus waiting to take us to the terminal. As it turns out, they were holding the bus for us. So, not only did the passengers have to endure Timofey's crying, but then they had to wait on us to get the kids dressed, gather our stuff and make it to the bus. Fortunately, we will never see these people again..... One individual though was incredibly helpful. He carried our umbrella stroller for us and offered to carry the diaper bag too. Thank goodness for compassionate people!! The experience gave us a new appreciation for parenthood.

The apartment that we are staying in is much smaller than the one in Kaliningrad. Actually, it is a studio apartment. We will make do though. As long as we have a kitchen and a laundry, we are good to go. After leaving the airport, it took us about 30 minutes to get to the apartment. By the time we got our luggage upstairs, fed the kids and got them into bed, it was around midnight.

The physician who needs to examine the children for U.S. Immigration arrived this morning bright & early, around 6:30 am to examine the kids. He seemed very nice, understanding and good with the kids. He measured their heads, height and weight, along with listening to their chests and giving them physical examinations. He also reviewed the medical records provided by the Kaliningrad region. He had some very good things to say about them.

After that, Alex, our agency representative stopped by around 9 am to pick up the physician reports on both children and to give us a quick overview of where we are in case we would like to go out this afternoon. We are within walking distance to the Krelim, so depending upon how well the children are doing today (sleep wise), we may walk down there. I hope we can make it. It would be great to take some photos of them there. We can also walk along a market street to get there and maybe do a little shopping.

I then accompanied Alex to the U.S. Embassy to pre-pay for tomorrow's visit to get the children's VISAs. We could have paid via cash to Alex and he would have handled it for us, but we need a credit card receipt in order to be able to submit the expenses for reimbursement through Shelly's company adoption benefit. He also dropped off all the paperwork and showed me where we need to go tomorrow. There were a couple long lines to get through security both outside and inside the Embassy but having a U.S. passport allowed us to bypass the lines.

We will return the the Embassy tomorrow. Our appointment is at 2pm. After that we will have all the necessary paperwork to get the kids home.

After visiting the Embassy, Alex dropped me at the local market so I could pick up a few things for our two days here. This market was a lot bigger than the one in Kaliningrad and had everything you would find back home. It even has a sushi bar.

This photo was from this morning. Click on it and you can see how big Timofey's feet are! Anastasiya was obviously very impressed.

Leaving for Moscow

2010-02-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

Today we leave for Moscow. The kids passports should be ready today which our driver will pickup. He is then going to go get Timofey's ticket to Moscow as we were not able to buy before he had a passport. Anastasiya will set on our lap. They both have their own seat for the long trip home from Moscow on Saturday.

This first photo of Timofey is of him and Shelly looking at animal pictures on her computer. I know I have said it many times but he loves animals. Shelly brought them both a few hats and he loved his. He keeps putting it on and wearing it around the apartment.

The next one of Anastasiya and her very hip outfit. On the first trip she always had some sort of hat on so we brought a few with us figuring she may be used to wearing one and may feel more comfortable with one on her head. She seemed pretty happy to have one.

Timofey may be only 27 months old but it appears from this photo that he can already read. I may be prejudiced a bit but the boy is brilliant.

This may or may not be our last post from Russia. We asked for an apartment in Moscow but we have no idea if they were able to book one. Even if they did we don't know if it will have internet access. These two keep us very busy so we may not have time to go out and find interent access if the apartment does not have it. Shelly's blackberry is having technical difficulties and has been reduced to nothing more than a phone at this point. I just wanted to give our families a heads up in case they don't see email or a blog post.

At last...

2010-02-02T14:47:00.013-05:00

Today we took the kids to get their passport photos and we then went to the government office to get their adoption certificates and birth certificates. The last day of our 10 day waiting period was yesterday. This region lets you count weekends which is nice since in some other regions they do 10 business days and we would have been here until next week waiting.

As I said during our first trip in November we decided to keep their original birth names. We gave them a new middle name and of course they took our last names. Our boy is 27 months old and his name is Timofey Alexander. Timofey is pronounced Tee-Ma-Fee. We often when saying his name just leave the "Fee" off the end. We actually have heard several different pronunciations but we went with the one the orphanage director uses and the one he has always heard. Our girl is 13 months old and is named Anastasiya Sophia. Her name is pronounced Anna-Sta-See-Ya. I often just say Anna.

This first picture of Timofey was taken at the orphanage. He can be pretty shy around people he does not know and Shelly was getting him to smile. He talks all the time with us now but when we took him out today to get his photo taken and to the government office he did not say one word.

This photo of Anastasiya was of her walking around the play room at the orphanage. It was during the first week of this trip and she was so proud of herself. She was not very steady but so happy to be walking about. She has had a lot more time to walk around recently and in just the two weeks since this photo was taken she has made a lot of progress. This next one of Timofey is him sitting on the potty. Even at 27 months he enjoys a good read while doing his business. He has both eyebrows raised which is one of his classic facial expressions although often reserved for when he looks at animal pictures with us but in this case it was for Mom taking his picture while sitting on the pot.This one is of Anastasiya is the first time Shelly brushed her hair. See did seem to enjoy it and if you click the image you can really see how blue her eyes are.

These next two are of us playing with the kids. The both love to be picked up and raised in the air or turned upside down. Timofey especially enjoys it.

This last one is a video I created from our first trip in November. If you have a slow computer or a slow connection you should just skip it. It is only 3 1/2 minutes long but it is a good sized file and will kill a punky computer or slow connection.

Simple return on Saturday

2010-01-31T10:03:00.004-05:00

So this Saturday we should be home with the kids. We are going to keep it real simple though so they are not too overwhelmed by the experience. Our friends Eric and Carol have my car parked at their house so we would not have to pay for three weeks of airport parking. It has the car seats installed and ready.

We know that our families want to meet the children but we are going to keep it really simple for a while for them. This is a very big adjustment as you can imagine. So it will just be our friends at the airport meeting us.

We also plan on having some mom/dad/kids bonding time when we get back so it may be a while before we invite people over and then it will probably just be a couple at a time. We are also going to be working on having the children attach to us and look to us for all their needs. Growing up in an orphanage means their caregivers changed from day to day and even shift to shift. So they need to figure out that we are going to be there for all their needs.

When we have people over we don't want to confuse things with them and so that they still look at us for all their needs we will be the ones holding them, feeding them, changing diapers and comforting them. This is not forever but just until we feel they are properly attached. We have talked to most of our families about this already so hopefully it does not come as a surprise.

Our boy calls us mama and papa now. If I give him something and say take that to mama he will take it to Shelly. I don't need to point at her or make a gesture. Pretty good for a boy just over two and just picking up on English.

Court Date +1 Week

2010-01-29T15:30:00.000-05:00

A week ago today we had our court date. It has been a great week for us. Although we have both come down with colds. Although I think we are getting close to being over them already. They were pretty mild, hopefully the kids don't pick them up from us.

I talked to our regional representative today and found out they will take us and the kids to get their passport photos taken on Tuesday. The 10 day waiting period ends Monday so Tuesday is our first opportunity. We should have their passports back on Wednesday and fly to Moscow on that day. We tried to buy our boy a plane ticket to Moscow but they would not let us because he does not have a passport yet. Our girl is young enough she can just sit on our lap the entire trip. We did buy them both seats though for the long plane fight home from Moscow. We should be home on Saturday the 6th.

We have taken over 400 photos of the kids so far on this trip and it would be more but I have my video camera out part of the time too. We will be posting pictures of the kids on the blog on Tuesday.

They are both doing really well and the changes we have seen in them since we first met them is amazing. Our boy who said two words over all the visits from the first trip until the court date is now talking to us all the time. He loves to imitate the animal sounds we make when reading books. His monkey imitation is pretty funny. He is running around like a little boy should. Our girl really can light up when she sees us and can put up a fuss if one of us (especially Shelly) leaves her sight.

Shopping

2010-01-27T14:41:00.002-05:00

Having an apartment on this trip is so nice. Not that the hotel wasn't nice, it really was. But having a kitchen, laundry and all the extra space is working out great. The apartment really has everything we need we just needed to grocery shop when we got here.

The first few days we were here we went out to dinner and stopped at the market each day on the way home to pick up supplies. We are fairly well stocked, especially on food for the kids as seen in my post from a couple days ago.

The market is nice but a lot smaller than what we are used to. It has a very small fresh meat section and some days has no fresh meat at all. If they have fresh meat it is usually chicken breasts and pork. Most of the meat is frozen. They have what we would think of as a deli type meat and a lot of sausage (salami like). They usually have eggs but not all the time. They have some baby food and supplies. They have a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables but it is only a fraction of what we are used to but then the store is downtown and does not have the space for it. Oh and Shelly swears the yogurt here is better. We have been having yogurt everyday for breakfast.

Right next to the market is a pharmacy. They have a much better selection of baby food, diapers and basic baby supplies. This is where we stocked up on a lot of our baby items.

On the corner is a fresh fruit stand. It is just off the sidewalk and is probably big enough to park one car in if it had a big enough door. They do have a lot more variety in fruit and a few vegetables too that the market does not have so I stop there now too.

My latest find though is right around the corner and in plain English it has a sign that says delicatessen. I first visited it yesterday when I was out shopping for dinner. It turned out that it is where many people go for fresh meat. They had mostly pork with some chicken. The only beef I saw was ground beef. I bought some of that yesterday and I got pork tenderloin from them today. The pork came out really very good.

The kids are doing great and they really seem to be adjusting to us well. Staying for the 10 day waiting period is really going to pay off for the long flight home and the transition once we get home I think. We see more of their personalities coming as we are all learning more about each other.

Personalities

2010-01-26T11:58:00.004-05:00

What a difference a few days can make. Last week in court I was asked if our boy could speak and I said we had been told he can but that we had heard him say only two words during the eight times we visited him before court and that was the day before court.

Today was so different. During the time we have had with him since court he has started to speak and actually does so a lot now. He must have been just shy. It is all in Russian so we have no idea at this moment what he is saying other than he does make animal noises when we look at a book with animals in it. When he sees a cat picture he does a pretty good meow. I know the Russian word for dog and I recognize him saying it when we look at dog pictures.

He loves books. The story is not a big deal at this point since he really does not understand us but he loves looking through them. Books with animals in them hold his attention the most. He really likes pop-up books and we have one where animals are hidden behind flaps and he just loves that one.

He walks around the room with us and points at things wanting us to tell him what it is. I expect if this keeps up he will pick up English very quickly.

He is gentle, calm and sharing. He does like things just so though. Everything has its place. We noticed last week when visiting him at the orphanage he was stacking these large soft building blocks and he did so by shape. All the round ones were being made into one tower and all the square ones into another. When we finished playing with toys he does a great job at helping clean up. We don't even say anything and when he sees us cleaning things up he joins in.

Our girl though we have been joking that she is a bit of a drama queen. She wants to do things her way and lets you know it. She does things with a flair. In this regard she is pretty much the opposite of our boy. For the most part though her demands are just for more attention from us. Not that she has been lacking attention. She also has a very big laugh. She is most of the time a very happy kid and does smile and laugh a lot.

They are both awesome kids. We just can't wait to get them home.

Just a quick note

2010-01-25T17:06:00.002-05:00

It is after midnight and we are both zonked. We had a busy day. Everything is going great, the kids are doing great and so are we. To be honest I don't think it could be much better. I'll post more soon but we have an early start tomorrow and we both need some sleep.

For our families we emailed out our pic of the day. Enjoy.

stocked up

2010-01-24T14:12:00.003-05:00

We shopped for food for the children last week. We bought a lot, but we wanted to have it in the apartment when Tatiana (our regional representative) came by so she could read us the back of the boxes of porridge and tell us the correct proportion of porridge to water since everything is obviously in Russian. We will almost certainly end up having more food than we need but we can carry home some stuff too so that their diet does not radically change and we can slowly move them over.

Pictured above you will see a lot of baby food in jars in the front. We went a little wild with this but we bought a lot of different varieties. These are for our little girl. We were told she is not a picky eater but just in case we have some variety and we can figure out what she likes.

On the left side are juice boxes and behind them some children's yogurt. We have some formula and were even able to find the brand that our girl is currently using. We were told she gets a bottle twice a day. We also bought a variety of porridge. If you look closely you can even see where Shelly had written on the boxes as she translated what was in them. And at the top is a bag of baby cookies. We know they like these. We bought a bag on the first trip and to be honest I had a fair share of them myself. They are good.

Not much going on today. We relaxed again and did a lot of reading. Everybody keeps telling us to rest up, so I guess we are. We get to see the kids again tomorrow. We can't wait.

Relaxing day

2010-01-23T14:42:00.003-05:00

Today we just had a relaxing day. We can't visit the children on the weekend because the orphanages have a reduced staff. So we just had a nice relaxing day and spent much of the day reading. I know we don't have many more days like these in our near future.

These pictures are taken from the balcony of our apartment and show the apartments across the street. We had another cold day here today around 10F and with the wind chill it felt a lot worse.

We will see the children again on Monday. For those of you looking for pictures of the children we will post them after the 10 day waiting period is up. Sorry, but no pictures until then on the blog.

Thanks to all our family and friends for the congratulatory emails and blog comments. We really do appreciate all the support.

Court Day

2010-01-22T09:26:00.003-05:00

This is going to be a long post. We had a big day.

Neither of us got a good night of sleep last night. We were of course worried about court and we had some last minute drama. Some paperwork for one of the kid's relatives was not done because they were unable to locate him. We were told the prosecutor, if she wanted to, could make a big deal about it and even ask to have the decision postponed to a later date while things get sorted out, if she felt that it was a problem. In the end this was not an issue.

Our court hearing was at 10 am this morning and we were picked up at 9:40 by our driver. The court was only about 5 minutes from our apartment. By the time we made it through security we had about 10 minutes before court started to talk to our interpreter. This was a different woman than the one we have been using to talk to the orphanage staff as our regular interpreter is not licensed to work in the court. Our interpreter explained how things were going to work. How I would most likely do all the talking and Shelly may only be asked a few questions. Russia is a very male dominated society still and this is one case where that stands out (more on this later). She showed us where we would sit and told us any time we talked to the judge the one doing the talking would need to stand to speak to her. She would lean over and tell us which one needed to stand or both stand or for both of us to sit down and listen. She said she would translate everything going on in the court for us and she did a very good job of doing that.

In the court today we had the Judge, a prosecutor, the court clerk and since we were asking to adopt two children and they were at different orphanages there was also a social worker for each child who was familiar with the family history of the children and a representative from each of the orphanages. The director of our girl's orphanage came and from our boy's orphanage one of the doctors came. Then of course there was our interpreter and us. Nobody else is allowed in the court room. I was the only male in the room.

We were warned ahead of time by our regional representative what she thought would be the focus of most of their questions today. Remember where I said how Russia is a very male dominated society. I don't know if I mentioned this before but our plan all along has been for me to be a stay at home dad. This along with the fact that I do most of the cooking (Shelly sometimes cooks on the weekends) and that I also clean the house and do laundry was something we were asked a lot of questions about. They really focused on if Shelly would be able to support the family financially. We came prepared for this question as we looked up last night what the income for the average family of four is and we were then able to compare that to Shelly's salary. In the end, I think that the fact that the prosecutor and judge were both women worked to our advantage in this situation and that they liked seeing a woman in the position of being able to provide for the family.

They wanted to know why we were adopting two children at once. The judge also asked if we have any experience taking care of young children and if we were really prepared to take on two children at one time.

The judge asked why we were adopting from Russia and asked us if we were going to teach the children about Russia. We hope the children are proud to be from Russia and certainly plan on letting them know as much as we know about it.

They asked us what days we visited with the children on both our trips and how much time we spent with them. They asked how those visits went and how the children reacted to us.

I also had to go over everything we knew about the children's medical history and social history. I had to explain to them everything that we had been told about the children including the relatives that we know about.

We were asked if we are all covered by medical insurance and when the children's coverage would start. They also wanted to know if the children were going to see a doctor on a regular basis and if we had appointments for them yet.

After I finished they then started asking Shelly questions. The first one was "Do you agree with everything your husband said". Which of course she does. :P

They asked Shelly only a few questions mostly to backup what I said about our financial situation. It did not take her long, she really did have it easy.

After that the social workers and orphanage representatives talked about the children. We learned a few new things about their family histories and I took notes on all the new material.

The prosecutor had a chance in each case after the judge finished questioning us or after the social workers and orphanage representatives finished talking to ask questions. Her questions were very fair and she was just looking for more details. After everybody else was finished, the prosecutor then went over the details of our case and made her recommendation to the judge (which was positive).

The judge then took a ten minute break and said she would be back with her decision. Based on how things went though we did start to celebrate at that time. Our regional representative came into the room (she was not permitted to attend the court hearing) to congratulate us.

After about 10 minutes the judge did come in and read her decision and it was positive. She declared that we are now parents. She told us that there is a 10 day period where somebody could appeal her decision and she asked us if we understood that. This is very unlikely as any relative who could appeal has already signed off on the adoption. The entire court hearing lasted about 2 1/2 hours, which I think is pretty good in that we adopted two children and had to repeat over a lot of stuff individually for each child.

We are of course very happy. I don't know if it has completly hit us yet. We got home and Shelly sent out a quick email to family, co-workers and friends. We then went out for lunch and then did some toy shopping as there is a toy store just a couple blocks up the road.

Day 4

2010-01-21T15:06:00.006-05:00

Today was our final day meeting with the children and due to having to spend time preparing for court tomorrow, we were able to visit only with our boy. The time was truly well spent! When he entered the room, he was in a very good mood (a piece of candy helped out). After he finished off the candy, he gave us many smiles. He looked through flash cards with Scott & I, then Scott read a few books to him and we spent the rest of the time with him playing among giant sized, soft building blocks of various shapes and colors. Some of the pieces were larger than him, but he never questioned whether to pick them up and place them where he felt they needed to be placed. He engaged Scott as his helper and our boy pointed to the piece he wanted, Scott helped him out by retrieving it for him, and our boy proceeded to build himself a fort to his liking. He was very particular in the construct, which we both found interesting. I tried placing a piece on top of another piece and he elected to replace my building block with the piece that he preferred. :))

We were on our way back to Kaliningrad when our driver received a phone call to return to the city where our boy is and pick up the Social Worker, who had to come to Kaliningrad with us to finish up some paperwork related to our adoption. We learned the details later from our regional representative and, hopefully, the Social Worker was able to finish up the necessary paperwork.

We then spent about 1 hour meeting with our Regional Representative, who helped us understand the types of questions we could be asked. Scott will be doing the majority of the talking and I may or may not be asked to respond to questions. Each hearing is a little different, so we will just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow. We spent this evening reviewing all paperwork we have completed over the past 2 years to re-familiarize ourselves with it just in case a particular detail is asked about. As a result, Scott and I then spent the rest of the evening at the apartment. We stopped at the grocery store earlier today and purchased what we needed to make dinner here. We are both tiring of eating dinner out, not due to lack of good food, which by the way we have found the local food here to be very good. We are simply getting tired of the restaurant scene for dinner. We have been making breakfast each morning in the apartment, but given the long hours we have been spending on the road running to the orphanages, we haven't had the energy to cook up meals at night.

We will be off to bed early tonight. We need to get a good nights sleep and be fresh in the morning. Thanks again for all of the positive comments! We really enjoy reading them.

3rd day of visits

2010-01-20T14:09:00.003-05:00

Today we woke up and found it was snowing and had been snowing for a while. The temperature has been around 20F most of the week. Yesterday with the wind it felt a lot colder. I guess these temperatures are not normal. According to Alexander (our driver) they usually only have about 10 days each winter below freezing. We got a couple inches of snow today (which about doubled what they already had on the ground). It did make for a much slower drive though and we started the day going to our boy's orphanage.

We played some ball and took out our computer to show him pictures and a movie we made from the first trip. He seemed very interested in seeing the pictures of himself and of his future sister. He really seemed interested in the video we showed from the first visit too. We did get him to smile for us a couple times although he does seem to be a lot more reserved than our girl.

So after leaving him we knew if we went straight to see our girl that she would be having her lunch by the time we got there so we had our lunch to pass the time. We got to spend about one and a half hours with her today. It was really nice. She is really just starting to walk and she enjoyed testing her legs out. She was walking around the room and dancing again for us. She smiles and laughs a lot which is such a big change from when we first met her in November. We were playing a lot with her and by the end of the time she did seem to be getting very tired. We were there during her nap time so it is not surprising that she was getting pooped.

We went shopping again today. We managed to find a pharmacy and bought a baby bottle tonight. We were told that she still gets a bottle twice a day and we want to keep her routine as normal as possible. We also bought porridge and some baby food in jars. I think we are all set as far as food goes for when we do eventually get the children, although when that will be is still unknown to us.

Tomorrow we only have time to see one of them so we are going to see our little guy. He is older and seems to be having a little harder time adjusting to us than she is. We have also had much less time with him as we always seem to be running up against his lunch time or nap time. After visiting with him tomorrow we come back to Kaliningrad and meet with our regional representative. She is going to prepare us for court which is on Friday morning.

Day 2 of 2nd Trip

2010-01-19T13:19:00.005-05:00

Scott & I visited the children again today. This time, we visited our boy first since today we were able to meet with the Social Worker. Unfortunately, our time with her was limited and we did not learn much more than we already knew. She did ask us a few questions though.

Our visit with our boy was nice. Again, he was upset when he was brought into the room, but once he spotted the books we had brought with us, he settled down pretty quickly. He definitely LOVES books. His favorites so far are:
1) "Where's Spot?" which is a story about a mama dog searching for her puppy who is hiding right before dinnertime. Each page includes a flap that you lift up to see if Spot is hiding under the flap. Each flap contains a different animal who says that Spot isn't hiding there. Our boy enjoys lifting each flap.
2) "Snuggle Up, Sleepy Ones" which is a story about different animals going to bed at night. This was highly recommended by a woman that I work with. The story includes lion cubs, leopards, antelope, porcupines, giraffes, monkeys, etc... The colors are fantastic and change dramatically with each page turned. This is a board book and he enjoys turning the pages.

The orphanage director surprised us with a CD that contains pictures from the orphanage's holiday celebration. All of the boys and girls were dressed up for Father Frost. It appears that children were dancing and eating and seemed to be watching a show. And, the playroom at the orphanage was all decorated for the holiday season.

As well, the orphanage director let us view our boy's sleeping room (Scott was able to see it during our last trip) and the playroom. In addition, they allowed us to take pictures of the rooms and we also took pictures of the caretakers, so our boy will be able to see who cared for him while he was there.

We then left for our 1 hour drive to see our girl. She also was upset at first, but quickly calmed down. Scott started playing music on his cell phone and she danced to the music. She is learning to use her legs pretty well. Although she cannot walk far by herself, she loves to move back and forth to the music and she is just so proud of herself for standing and moving on her own. It is just great to watch. We had about 1 hour total with her today and it was right after her lunch, right before she normally would be going down for a nap. She did well for about the first 40 minutes, but she tired very quickly and just wanted to be held the balance of the time. She also is teething and seemed bothered by not having a teether. We had brought a "super teether" over for her and left it with her yesterday. Unfortunately, the orphanage didn't bring it back with her when she visited with us today. Despite that, they have been VERY GOOD about bringing her to us with the clothing and blanket that we brought over for her on the first trip. We brought extra teethers with us so we need to remember to bring another one tomorrow. However, we are saving the "surprise teether" for the flight home. My sister-in-law, DJ, purchased her a vibrating teether that I expect she will be thrilled with, so that one is put away until our big travel day. It appears from the comment made yesterday by my brother, Mike, that DJ is out shopping for even more stuff!!! Thanks DJ!!!

Today was the first day that we were able to see our girl's sleeping and play rooms. They also allowed us to take pictures which we will put away in a safe place for her to view when she gets older.

Scott & I are shopping each night for food for the children. We went to the local market and purchased food appropriate for our girl, based upon the recommendations of the orphanage director. Our boy should be able to eat pretty much everything that we eat. The difficulty we are having is most print is in Russian and we are having to look up in our small dictionary what we purchased after we get back to the apartment. You can get a sense of what you are buying by the pictures, but as for instructions on how to make certain things (water to food ratios...), well it is somewhat of a guess. I expect we will get through it though...but in the meantime, I expect these children will be eating a lot of buckwheat porridge. Interesting how many varieties there are!

Thanks for staying up to date with the blog. We really appreciate the postings and well wishes!

Our first day and apartment pics

2010-01-18T13:14:00.009-05:00

After being up for 36 hours flying over here we got 5 hours of sleep last night. We did both sleep well though. But then we were pretty tired.

We went to breakfast and then our driver picked us up and took us to see our girl. She put up a fuss when she saw us and for a minute it seemed like we were back at square one again with her. Every time she looked at me she would start up again. It didn't take long though and she was a happy girl.

On the first visit at the end of November we were able to get her to smile a few times. This time she was laughing and found when Shelly would tickle her or I would mimic her very funny. We had a game going for a while where she would make a noise or face and I would do it back at her. She found that very funny. We had a very nice visit with her.

We took a bunch more photos although I think she does not like the flash on my camera as she has her eyes closed in all the pictures except the first one. She also didn't have a hat on today which was different as she was always wearing some sort of hat on the first trip.

The staff at the orphanage is really making an effort. We brought her clothes and left them with her on our very first visit at the end of November. Everyday after that when we visited she was dressed in one of the outfits. And today she was again in one of the outfits we brought her on the first trip and she came wrapped in the blanket we brought for her. She just barely fit into the outfit so it is good that all the clothes we brought her this time are the next size up.

At the end of the visit when the caregiver came to pick her up our girl did a little dance for us. The caregiver and I were humming some music and she started a little dance. Very cute.

We then went to see our little guy. When we arrived it was during his nap time so we waited about half an hour for him to wake up. When they brought him in the poor guy was still rather sleepy but sat on Shelly's lap while she read him some books. He loves books and he really likes to look through them and have us tell him what each thing in the book is be it pictures, letters or numbers. He just keeps pointing at them and we keep telling him what they are.

We also played some ball and the little guy enjoys tossing us the ball. He has a good arm and Shelly was teaching him how to high five.

We brought pictures from the first trip and put them in an album. We also have pictures of our relatives, house and pets in it. He really seemed to enjoy looking at the album. He spent a lot of time looking at the pictures that were of us with him and the pictures of us with our girl. He has not met her yet as she lives about an hour away from him. Pictures of our family (i.e. people he has never met) and pictures of the house did not hold his interest. Pictures of our dog and two cats really seemed to peak his interest though. He looked at them several times and would point at them and we would tell him their names.

The pictures I included in this post are of the apartment we are staying in. We really like it. It is less expensive than the hotel and a lot bigger. We will be in Russia for three weeks and two and a half weeks will be here in Kaliningrad. Once we get the children I think it will really be nice to have this place. We don't want to go out for dinner with them all the time and this place has a kitchen with all the dishes and pots and pans that I think we will need. It also has a washing machine so while it did seem like we packed a lot of stuff we don't have more than a few days clothing for ourselves (plus court clothes too which we will wear for only a few hours hopefully). The apartment even has a crib which is great. We just need to figure out sleeping arrangements for our other child.

After dinner we did some grocery shopping. There is a small 24 hour market right around the corner from the apartment. This was a very interesting experience. We had been in this market before on the first trip as the hotel we stayed in is very near it. Still we were not shopping with actually trying to cook on the first trip. Some stuff was pretty easy to figure out but other things are just packaged differently than like at home so it took some time. We ended up getting mostly breakfast stuff and starting to stock up on supplies for the kids. The market is not far away at all and I am sure we will be back many more times.

It was a great day. Tomorrow we start out early again and we will see his social worker who we did not meet last time. We know some of his social history from the minister of education and his doctors but the social worker should be able to go into a lot more detail.

We are in Kaliningrad

2010-01-17T18:15:00.002-05:00

It is just a little after 1am here and we just arrived at the apartment we are staying in while in Kaliningrad. We are going to be here for two and a half weeks so we got an apartment instead of staying at a hotel. The regional representative for the agency arranged everything for us.

The apartment is very nice. We are very happy. I will post pictures soon. We are just dead tired right now. We figure we have been up now for 36 hours. Being tired is good, hopefully we sleep well tonight and get adjusted quickly to the time difference. We don't get to sleep in tomorrow. They are picking us up in the morning to go see the kids. Yeah!!!!

2010-01-16T06:28:00.001-05:00

We leave today and I think we have pretty much everything all set. Their rooms are ready. We tried to keep things simple as too many things in a room may be over stimulating. For the most part the rooms are simple. We may move them both into the same room for a while as they are not used to sleeping in a room by themselves. But we have both rooms setup if it should seem like they would do better that way. I think we should have some sense of that by the time we get them home.

We have received a lot of children's books as gifts for the kids. At Christmas my Dad loaded us up with a lot of books and then we have received books from several people (mostly those that Shelly works with) in the last couple weeks. This is great, we plan to do a lot of reading to the children and have even put a chair in his room for story time.

The house is pretty much ready for them. I installed several gates to keep them from tumbling down the stairs. We bought all sorts of baby proofing gadgets. They sure do make a lot of different things although I am not sure how many you really do need.

So today we have a eight hour flight to Amsterdam, then an hour and a half layover and then we fly to Moscow which is another three hours. We then fly to Kaliningrad which is another three hours I think. We don't have the tickets for Moscow to Kaliningrad yet as the adoption agency makes all the arrangements for flights within Russia. So we are not even sure yet what time that flight is. Somebody will meet us though when we get off the airplane in Moscow. It will be a long day of travel, not that I am complaining, we have been waiting for this day for a long time.

Tickets booked

2010-01-05T11:41:00.002-05:00

I booked our tickets a couple days ago for our next trip to Russia. We will be leaving on Saturday January 16th and arrive in Moscow in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday. We should then be able to catch a flight to Kaliningrad and see the children again the following day. It has been almost six weeks since we saw them on our first trip and we can't wait to get back on the plane again.

These plane tickets cost a bit more than the first ones. They are fully refundable and changeable though and we did end up buying each of them a seat for the trip back. We could have gotten away with not buying four seats for the trip home but this way we have the entire middle row for ourselves. It would be a long flight to keep one or both of them on our laps the entire time.

Our current schedule calls for us to meet with the children the first week we are back over there and then our court date is set for January 22nd and after a 10 day waiting period plus a couple more days to get their Russian passports we should be leaving Kaliningrad on February 3rd. We then fly to Moscow so we can go to the U.S. Embassy and get the proper paperwork to get them into the US. We then fly back home on February 6th. That is at least the current plan if everything goes smoothly.

Our Schedule:

*Jan 16* Leave for Moscow

*Jan 17* Arrive in Moscow, take flight to Kaliningrad

*Jan.18* - visit the children

*Jan.19* - visit the children

*Jan.20* - visit the children

*Jan.21* - visit the children & preparation for court

*Jan.22* - court hearing

*Feb.2* - submit documents for children's passports

*Feb.3 *- get children's passports

*Feb.3 * - in the evening - take flight to Moscow

*Feb.4 *- submit documents for children's visas to the US Embassy

*Feb.5* - get children's visas

*Feb.6* - depart from Moscow to home.

An early Christmas present

2009-12-23T20:11:00.002-05:00

I just got off the phone this afternoon and I was talking to our consultant about what we would do if we didn't get our U.S. Immigration paperwork updated in time for the court date. We were talking about postponing our court date for two or three weeks. Not something we want to do obviously. Becuase of the holidays the visa service wanted our paperwork tomorrow in order to get the visas done in time for us to travel as the Russian consulate is closed for over a week and a half at the beginning of January for the holidays.

After I got off the phone though with her I went and checked our mailbox. Our I-171H arrived today!! For those that don't know the I-171H is the approval paperwork we were waiting for from U.S. Immigration. We noticed the date on it and it was actually processed a couple weeks ago and they had just not sent us the form right away. The approval date is only one week after they had originally received our paperwork. We had just received the standard form letter from them last week saying they had received our paperwork but that it can take up to 90 days for them to process it. We are very thankful to them for processing it so quickly.

Shelly ran off to the bank to get a cashiers check (the visa service only takes a cashiers check or money order) and I stayed home and filled out the necessary paperwork for the visas. We signed them and I then ran the paperwork down to FedEx and sent them overnight to the visa service. They should be back a couple days before we leave.

We have everything done now, at least as far as the paperwork goes. There are of course lots of projects we have to do around the house but those will be a lot easier to do now that we know we cleared the paperwork hurdle.

Shopping Spree

2009-12-15T10:19:00.003-05:00

We have been on a bit of a shopping spree lately. We need a lot of things for the kids room. A lot of the bigger ticket items we got for free though. We have a lot of credit card points because we put everything on the cards, even things like our phone, electric and water bills. We are good about it though and don't go too crazy with our credit cards so we can pay them off in full every month. We have saved the points for a few years now and as a result we have enough points that we bought a bunch of stuff with them including car seats, a double stroller, gates for the stairs, baby thermometers, a potty, diaper bags and a few other odds and ends. We still only used about half the points.

We went shopping yesterday and bough a toddler bed for him and bedding sets for both. We also purchased a bunch of new clothes for them. We still need some more outfits and some other gear which we may get for Christmas as we filled our wish lists with things for the children.

I recieved the background check from the state police last week that is needed by the Russian courts. It took them about a week to process that for us which was very nice to see them getting it done so quickly. We are still waiting on U.S. Immigration though. We are trying to get them to get things done early for us but I can't really tell if they will get it done in time for us to make our court date next month or not.

Getting things done

2009-12-01T21:11:00.002-05:00

Ok, so we are home. We have been since Sunday afternoon. After taking Sunday to relax a bit since we were so tired from the trip we started to organize things a bit on Monday and I started to get photos and video ready to show off our trip a bit.

Shelly made a quick run Monday afternoon to get our updated home study signed and notarized so we could get it sent in to U.S. Immigration. We were given the idea to run it up to the nearest U.S. Immigration office and drop it off to them directly in hopes of speeding up the process some.

We did that today. They would not let us do that or talk to anybody in the adoption unit. They said they only accept the forms through the mail so we sent a couple hundred yards up the road to the nearest post office and mailed it to them. We are now just hoping to get it back from them soon enough so that we can travel in January for our court date.

We also had our finger prints taken today. And I sent them fedex to the state police department so they can do a criminal background check on us. We need this done for the Russian courts. I sent them a return fedex envelope and I am sure we will get this back in time. From what I hear from other families they can turn things around pretty fast.

The medical forms from our doctor arrived while we were in Russia so I am getting them apostiled tomorrow and running them up the the agency offices. I am just doing everything on our side that we can do to keep us on track. As of right now getting our update from U.S. Immigration is probably the only thing that could be a problem.

Last full day

2009-11-28T13:01:00.002-05:00

This is going to be real quick. We are tired and need to get some sleep.

We saw the sights today in St. Petersburg. It was a nice day. We visited both the Summer and Winter Palaces.

We leave for home tomorrow and our driver is picking is up at the hotel at 5am. We should be home sometime Sunday afternoon.

Back in St. Petersburg

2009-11-27T15:40:00.003-05:00

We left Kaliningrad today and arrived back in St. Petersburg. We had a long day, it is almost midnight here.

We started the day by going to visit our boy. He was looking good today and we got to spend about an hour with him before we had to go. He seems to be a smart little guy. We played catch with him which I am pretty sure he has never done before. We also had a puzzle which we worked on with him which matched different shapes to go in different spots. He needed some help but really did alright. We then played with some tower stacking cups. The cups have to go in a certain order to stack properly and he really did very well with it. Really well. We know that he definitely likes cookies! We gave him another cookie today and he took it immediately from our hands. We had a very good visit with him.

Afterwords the director of the orphanage took me (Shelly had stepped out and was not present when the director offered this -so, she is very disappointed!) to see the room where he sleeps. The room had about 11 cribs in it. I then got to peak in on him in his play group. It was just a quick look but I got to seem him with all his buddies.

We didn't have time to go see our girl though we had to go back to the city as we had an appointment with the judge. We met with her for about half an hour or so I think. I am guessing she asks these questions of everybody but the questions that we remember:

1) Why do you want to adopt two children?
2) Are you familiar with this child's medical history, asked twice once for each of them.
3) What do you know about their social history, again asked twice, once for each.
4) Do you own your home?
5) How much is the monthly mortgage and how many more payments do you have?
6) How are you going to care for the children?
7) What are your jobs and how much do you make each year?
8) What can the children do? Can they speak, personality, walk, run, etc...
9) When were we married and is this our first marriage?
10) Do we have children? From this or a prior marriage?
11) How many times did we visit with the children?
12) Does our state allow us to adopt after being married for only 4 years?

She then setup a court date for us which is January 22nd, which is on a Friday so we need to arrive early enough to visit the children again. The court requires us to visit them five more times.

If all goes well we will have them home in early February.

Tomorrow we are scheduled for another tour of St. Petersburg, this time with a different guide. Unfortunately, Alex is not available to conduct a tour tomorrow. We plan to visit a few more museums and do some shopping.

We will leave St. Petersburg for home at 8 am on Sunday.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T14:27:00.007-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. We had a good Thanksgiving here. :) It is almost 9:30 pm and just got back from dinner with another couple from the US. They have their court date tomorrow. They are great and it was really nice to share our stories about this adventure we are on. Their blog is here:http://alexandrafaithkneiding.blogspot.com/

Today we started out earlier than we have on other days. We had a new driver today who spoke almost no English. We both really liked him. He pointed out several things along the way in very broken English and on the way back when we were taking video he made a real effort to slow down and even stop a couple times for us since he knew we were taking pictures and video. He was awesome. This was the first day in Kaliningrad where it has not been raining or completely overcast while driving and it was only nice on the way back from seeing our girl so it really was our best opportunity to get some pictures for them.

Our translator didn't go with us today. We didn't need her since we were only visiting with the children and not meeting any doctors or social workers.

We first went to see our little guy. We have missed spending time with him the last couple days because he was not feeling well. Today he seemed a little tired but other than that he seemed fine. They still only let us have 15 minutes with him, they didn't want to push it until they know he is fine.

We took some photos with the director of the orphanage. She is a very nice lady. We then gave him a juice box. He has never used a straw before which the director warned us about. She went and got him a cup, which he is used to and he seemed to enjoy it.

We then spent some time looking through a book. He seems to really enjoy books and pointing to the pictures. We would then tell him what each thing is in the book. We missed a photo opportunity though as the caretaker was taking him from the room. He gave us a big smile after we handed him a stuffed cat, which was his first smile with us. Neither of us had either camera in our hands though. :( We are hoping we have more time with him tomorrow.

We were then off to see our girl. You can tell she is starting to warm up to us. She was fine today when they handed her to Shelly. We played a bit on the floor. We have found out she seems to really enjoy music. I gave her my phone which has a bunch of music loaded on it and she seems to really like the music.

After playing with her for awhile on the floor, Shelly started moving away from her and taking photos from a distance. Unlike other days, today she was fine with one on one time with me. And by the end of our visit, she was fine with me holding her. It took four days, but we let her get there at her own pace and she seems to have finally adjusted to us.

Looking back at the pictures you can see a real progression with her. She was pretty unhappy the first day and most of the photos her eyes are full of tears. The second day was less so but we never saw her smile. By the third day, Shelly had her smiling and today she was smiling more and finally letting me hold her too. This was our last day with her on this trip since tomorrow morning we are scheduled to visit only with our little boy.

We have a meeting with the judge in the afternoon tomorrow so we only have time to see one child and we will go see our boy if he is feeling well enough for us. After the meeting with the judge we go back to St. Petersburg.

Learning more and names

2009-11-25T13:58:00.004-05:00

So today we met with the doctor who knew the children from birth. She was able to tell us a lot about their early days before they were moved to the baby homes they are in now. It was a good meeting. We didn't learn anything surprising but it did help us learn a little more about them.

We then went for coffee while we waited for our driver. We talked to the regional director while we waited who also went with us to visit the doctor along with our interpreter. We told her what their names are going to be. She seemed to be somewhat surprised but I would say pleasently so.

From very early on we started working on children names. Coming up with a girl name was really pretty easy but coming up with a boy name took a lot more time. Our idea early on was to come up with a first name and then take their current first name and make it their middle name. In the end we did the exact opposite. We decided they are losing everything else, they both know and respond to their names so we should keep their current first names. This was even suggested in some adoption books that we read that we should do just that.

When we were initially given our little girl's name it had been Americanized. It was certainly a name we recognized but when we got over here we learned the way they say it. It is a very pretty name so we are going with the traditional Russian way. His name had not been Americanized and is spelled just the way it was given to us although we had pronounced it just a little wrong. So we had their names, their first names are the names they were given at birth and we were not changing them, we gave them new middle names and of course they are taking our last name.

We spent a lot of time discussing this but it was something we both felt was important in the end for them to keep this one part of their past. They are after all leaving everything else behind to start a new life.

After all that we drove up to visit our girl. We talked to her social worker and got a lot of background on her family. Now when she gets older we will be able to tell her about her bio family. At least as much as the social worker knew. We were able to spend a lot more time with her today and she is certainly getting more used to us. We came back to the hotel afterwards as the director of the orphanage where our boy is staying said he was still not feeling 100% yet. We were told we can seem him tomorrow though but only for a half hour or so. It still does not sound like anything to worry about, they are just being a bit over protective I think.

P.S. Ashley we are sending you some very special pictures as a reward for being the only relative to post a comment on the blog. Way to go!

New day

2009-11-25T01:40:00.008-05:00

Seems like we are doing a morning and evening post here so if you only come once a day there may be more than one post to catch up on. :)

It is almost 9am here. I don't think we are fully adjusted to the time change yet. Kaliningrad is 7 hours difference from back home. I wake up a couple hours early each morning and Shelly is the opposite she has trouble falling asleep.

Well that's it for now. The photo we took at the cafe yesterday while waiting for our driver. It is my cappuccino.

2nd visit

2009-11-24T13:47:00.003-05:00

We got to see the kids again today. It was another 5 hours round trip from the city but well worth it of course.

We first went to see our little girl. Yesterday she was pretty upset when she was handed to Shelly and today she was upset too but not for very long. She obviously remembered us since it did not take long at all for her to calm down. She still does not know what to make of me though. Like I said yesterday the staff is all women but she is slowly warming up. We are letting her go at her own pace though and she is definitely doing better.

She definitely is looking to Shelly for comfort though from the big scary man. No comment though on if Shelly is getting a big kick out of being her favorite.

She was wearing one of the outfits we brought for her and she did look really cute in it. Our visit only lasted an hour as we needed to talk to the doctor at the other orphanage since we arrived so late yesterday we didn't get to do so.

We talked with the doctor about our little guy and came away feeling very good about him. We just saw him for a brief minute because he had a slight fever today. It seems as if one of the children came down with something so they were being cautious. It didn't seem like anything to worry about but they take the health of the children very seriously.

We are using the University of Minnesota to help us with the children and they reviewed the information we had before we left and provided us with some questions they wanted us to ask. We will send in his info tonight and we just got their opinion on her info back today. So far so good though. :)

Tomorrow we meet with a doctor who cared for the children before they went to where they are now. I don't think that meeting will take very long, we then have some paperwork to sign and then we are off to visit some more. Hopefully he is feeling better and we will be able to see both.

Meet the kids day. :)

2009-11-23T15:29:00.001-05:00

What a day. We were picked up at 11:30 to go meet the minister of education. He gave us some very basic information on the children including their full names (we just had their first names), their date of birth and some names of any close relatives that they knew about. We will get more information on both of their backgrounds later in the week when we meet with their social workers. He then asked us if we wanted to meet the children. Well we did just travel all the way from the States and have been waiting for this day for some time so I am guessing everybody knows our answer.

After meeting a short time with him we got on the road. There was five of us, the two of us, plus our interpreter, our driver and the regional representative. It was about a two hour drive to the orphanage and we got to meet the little girl that was referred to us. After a short wait they brought her in to us. She was not real happy about being handed to a stranger but Shelly was able to calm her down after a few minutes. She kept a very good eye on me though. There are no men who work at the orphanage so I guess I was an oddity for her.

The head of the orphanage was not there today so some of the other staff answered the medical questions we had about her. We had a couple pages of questions and they seemed happy to answer anything we asked. We got information such as her measurements at birth and then every few months after that. What doctors she has seen and tests that were run. They said she has been immunized against everything that is age appropriate for her and that we would get the detailed records later in the trip. We will meet with her social worker tomorrow and get more details on her social background.

We then got to spend a half hour with her. It was in the play room and we played with several different toys we had brought for her. She seems like a very independent little girl. She had warmed up to Shelly pretty good but was still keeping a close eye on me. We snapped several photos and took some video. The time was short but we had to get on the road so we could see the boy we had been referred.

He was about an hour away and by the time we got there it was pretty late so we had half an hour to spend with him. It was too late to talk to anybody who worked there about him so we will do that tomorrow. We had about half an hour with him and he was certainly very cautious at first and we sat and looked at some books with him. He was very quickly pointing at different things on the pages and getting us to tell him what each thing, letter or number was. He seemed like a smart little guy. We again took a number of pictures and some video but it seemed like that half hour really flew by.

We then had another 2 hours to drive back to town so we spent over 5 hours in the car today. Well worth it though, this is day we will always remember. We got back around 8pm and went out for a nice dinner.

Tomorrow we will have more time to spend with them. We leave earlier and we don't have to stop to see the minister of education.

2009-11-23T03:59:00.005-05:00

We are in Kaliningrad. We got in last night a couple hours late because our flight was delayed leaving St. Petersburg. The Russian airline that we flew in on was very nice. It is sunny and nice here today in Kaliningrad.

Yesterday, our guide, Alex, picked us up at 9 am. Stacey & Kim joined us for the day and we toured St. Petersburg until 3:30 pm when we had to leave for the airport. Alex is an amazing guide! Her knowledge of St. Petersburg and the history of Russia is quite deep and she displayed tremendous pride when talking about the city and country. We drove around St. Petersburg quite a bit and looked at the various monuments and buildings. We also toured 2 cathedrals and 2 museums. Alex took us to a small cafe for lunch that served Russian pies. I tried the salmon pie and Shelly tried a chicken pie. Both were excellent!

These photos were all taken Yesterday during our tour of St. Petersburg. We have another day of sight seeing on Saturday. The photos can be clicked on to see a higher resolution version.
In about 1/2 an hour we are being picked up to go to the minister of education. After that meeting we will go to the orphanages.

We found out last night from our driver Alexander that the kids are in two different orphanages both about 120k outside of town and about 120k away from each other. So we have some time to spend in the car today. We will post more later on.

We arrived in St. Petersburg safely

2009-11-21T14:27:00.003-05:00

We arrived safely in St. Petersburg at about 5:30pm local time. We had a very nice flight over, it took about 12 1/2 hours including the 2 hours we were in Amsterdam waiting for the next flight.

We were picked up at the airport by Alex who works for our Adoption Agency over here and she along with our driver took us to the hotel.

Tomorrow we leave around 5pm to Kaliningrad but before that we are going to get a tour of St. Petersburg from Alex.

Above is a photo of us out to dinner here tonight. We met Stacy (back left) and her friend Kim (front left in photo) who are also from the States and Stacey is also working with our agency. Stacey has her court date this week and showed us some great pictures of the boy she is adopting and he looks great.

We had a nice dinner. I had Chicken Kiev and Shelly had some sort of pork dish. It was very nice to talk to share our adoption stories with them.

Thats all for now tough. We are both very tired and it is about 10:30 pm here and we did not sleep a lot on the plane ride over.

Leaving for Russia today

2009-11-20T08:46:00.002-05:00

Our flight leaves for Russia tonight at around 10pm. We are flying to Amsterdam and getting a connecting flight to St. Petersburg after an hour and a half layover. We should arrive in St. Petersburg Saturday around 6pm local time.

Shelly has an appointment this morning with our doctor. This will be to get the paperwork updated for our home study and the paperwork for court. I went last week and just need him to sign off and notarize mine as he was waiting for test results to come back before he could complete it.

We are of course very excited and hoping that things work out this time. Our next update should be from Russia. :)

Shopping day

2009-11-16T22:37:00.003-05:00

Shelly had the day off today. So after running out get a document notarized and apostiled and then running it up to the adoption agency we went shopping. We wanted to bring the children a few gifts. We bought some stuffed toys for them. We bought doubles of each since we were told they will probably not come home with the one we give them. We also bought a few things for them to play with while we visit. The girl is around 1 year old and the boy a little over 2. So the toys were obviously geared for young children. If anybody has some good ideas of stuff to bring on the first trip for them we would appreciate it.

We also bought them some clothes. Shelly sent me off to find the boy some clothes while she shopped for her. We tried to buy clothes that will fit them based on the measurements we have. We are taking them with us and giving them to the orphanage. We realize though that they may not even ever wear them but that is fine somebody is going to have some new outfits to wear.

I called last week and checked on our visas. They should be done Tuesday and then they will fedex them to us. We should easily have them before Friday night when our flight leaves. We have several little things to do before then.

So one hiccup we may have is that our U.S. Immigration paperwork expires at the beginnning of next month. We redid our homestudy a few months ago but apparently when it was done the updates needed for us to get an extension were not done. So we redid our medicals and we are having another home visit so we can get it updated. The region we are in tends to schedule the court dates pretty quickly so I don't know if the paperwork with U.S. Immigration will be done in time as they tend to get things done pretty slowly.

Kes

2009-11-14T22:20:00.028-05:00

This is my first post that is not adoption related. While there is no adoption related material here, I'll get back to that soon, I need a break from that today.

This is Kes. About 6 weeks ago she was diagnosed with cancer. Her prognosis was not good but we were working with some very good doctors at a local (a little more than an hour away) university veterinary teaching hospital and we were bringing her to their oncology department.

When she was diagnosed the cancer was already very advanced. It was in her pancreas, intestines and colon. We started her on chemo and I drove up there with her every week for treatment. While the treatment had little chance of curing her we wanted to give her as many good days as we could. The doctor hoped to bring the cancer in check for a while.

She had her last treatment on Monday. When she came home she was feeling really good. She was having a really good day. Tuesday she was not feeling as well and was not eating a lot. On Wednesday I could not get her to eat or drink at all. I took her to our vet and she consulted the doctors at the oncology center and they wanted to see her so I drove her up there. They wanted to give her some fluids and keep her for a couple nights. They did everything they could to get her to start eating again. On Friday they said we should come and pick her up. There was nothing more to do for her. They did everything they could for her but the cancer was just too advanced.

Kes was wonderful and unlike any of the other cats I have had. She would have been 15 in January and I have had her since she was a kitten. She greeted me at the door when I came home and followed me around the house. She liked to be where I was. She slept in our bed with us almost every night coming to bed when I came to bed and would sleep either on me or next to me the entire night. When I was on the computer she was often on my lap or laying next to the keyboard.

Kes was a talker. If I said her name she would meow back at me. If I kept talking to her she would meow when I finished. We would keep doing this for some time I would say something she would meow and I would say something else to her she would meow back again and again...

Shelly came into our lives five years ago. At first I don't think Kes really wanted to share me with Shelly, she after all had me to herself for several years before Shelly came on the scene. Shelly did win her over though and Shelly is very much an animal lover and I do believe animals know who those people are. One of my final memories of Kes as we were sitting in the doctors office was of her getting up from my lap when Shelly sat down next to me so that she could lay down again half on me and half on Shelly.

paperwork chase

2009-11-13T08:02:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was a busy day. I went to city hall to get our proof of housing form updated. I drove up to our adoption offices and got them to notarize a letter where we formally requested them to hold the children for us. I guess this is something that they sometimes do in this region. Then got all the documents apostiled and drove them back to the adoption offices.

Our consultant wanted to meet with me so I sat down with her for about 30 minutes and we talked about the first trip. Things like how to dress while in Russia, how much to pack, bringing gifts for the children, how much money we should bring for expenses and all sorts of other things to make sure we are ready.

I then had an appointment with my doctor to get some a forms filled out. US immigration approval expires next month. We need to get this extended obviously and to do so one thing we had to do was visit the doctor again. I also had him do the paperwork necessary for the Russian court. I am going in for some blood tests today so he will be able to sign off on everything. He needs to write a letter for us saying how long he has been our doctor and then provide a copy of his medical license. Shelly is going in with me today to have her blood tests done too and her appointment with him is next Friday. He should have our results back by then and will then be able to sign off on the necessary forms. He has been great to work with and really seems to want to do what he can to help.

I also asked him if he could recommend a pediatrician for us. He has three kids of his own and said he really likes the doctor that he takes his own kids to. I think we are going to defiantly check into this doctor.

Shelly has the day off today and after we have the blood tests we have lots of running around to do.

Flight booked

2009-11-11T21:51:00.002-05:00

Our consultant called this morning and said it would be ok to book the flight. So I sent out our Russian visa application today and paid extra for it to be done in four business days. We had taken the pictures last Friday in anticipation of needing them soon. They should get back to us just barely in time for our flight on Friday.

We leave Friday November 20th and we will arrive in St. Petersburg on Saturday around 6pm. We didn't need to be there until Sunday night but we figured we would be pretty wiped out so we are coming in on Saturday and that gives us Sunday to rest up. At the tale end of the trip we are staying an extra day in St. Petersburg. It sounds like there are a lot of cool things to see, it should be fun.

Here is what our week will look like:

Nov.21 - arrival in St.Petersburg
Nov.22 - in the evening - take flight to Kaliningrad
Nov.23 - get appointment to meet the children, meet the children
Nov.24 - meet the children
Nov.25 - meet the children
Nov.26 - meet the children
Nov.27 - go to the notary, in the evening take flight back to St.Petersburg
Nov.28 - sightseeing in St.Petersburg
Nov.29 - departure from St.Petersburg

So it is official: no turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie or football this year on Thanksgiving day but we will be seeing the children. It's going to be a good Thanksgiving this year.

Here we go...

2009-11-10T14:14:00.003-05:00

Well I know it has been a long time since I posted. Shelly and I felt that things were going very poorly for us and that the posts were just getting a little negative. So until we have good news to post we just decided to hold off.

Well we have good news. We received another referral and sent the medical information off to the doctors that we have been using at The University of Minnesota. These doctors have been great and I think have really helped us. We received the information on the kids on Friday and uploaded it right away. By Monday we got their opinions back and we looked it over and talked about it Monday night when Shelly got home. It really was not much to talk about though, the doctor came back with very good things to say about these children.

I called our consultant this morning and told her. She said they are ready for us and that I should check into airline tickets. We need to get a Russian visa to be able to travel to Russia and that takes several days. If we paid for them to expedite it we could have it next week. They want us to arrive in St. Petersburg on either Saturday or Sunday and from there we would fly to Kaliningrad. So the earliest we could travel would be a week from Friday November 20th. Our consultant is double checking to make sure those dates work.

Even though it is short notice the flights from the US to Russia are actually cheaper than if we waited until December. I suspect it is because Americans are not going to Russia over Thanksgiving. So if they say its ok for us to go then we will spend Thanksgiving in Russia and according to the preliminary itinerary we got Thanksgiving day would be our fourth and final visit with the children on this trip. Sounds like a very good way to spend Thanksgiving to me.

This is what we know and are sharing about the children right now. We have a referral for a boy and a girl. Unlike the referrals we have received to date these children are not biologically related. Which we have always said would be fine by us. We had also indicated we would like them to be three and under and they both are. I know I am not being real specific here but I'll post more about them as we go along, they do look like two great little kids.

We have lost one referral already as we were waiting for travel dates so we know things are not done until we have them in our arms for good but we can't wait to get on that plane. With any luck I should get the go ahead to book those tickets tomorrow from our agency. That will feel really good.

still here

2009-10-07T10:27:00.002-04:00

Well its been a little while since my last post. And there certainly was a lot going on but we were basically in a waiting mode as we were waiting on more information. Last Friday we finally did get some more information.

If you remember from our last post we had a referral for two sisters but they were in another region. We had given their medical information to be evaluated by a doctor and he came back with some questions. We finally got an answer on Friday. We posted the results back to the doctor and unfortunately we are not going to be able to accept this referral either. Our biggest concern has always been FAS and based on the evaluation of the referral by a couple of doctors they both felt the oldest of the two girls showed some strong signs of FAS. This was obviously very disappointing to us.

We got another referral though on Friday. This time for a boy. We got the most basic of medical information and a photo that was very low resolution and just off from the Russian adoption database. We requested more information and better photos so that we could send it onto the doctors to get their opinion. I would be surprised if we get any more information though until sometime next week.

roller coaster week

2009-09-17T13:35:00.005-04:00

If you didn't see our last post we lost our referral on Friday of last week. We were obviously not very happy about it. We have received a lot of positive support from everybody and that part has been great. Thank you.

This has been an interesting week. On Monday our consultant called and asked how we were doing. I told her we were upset about losing the referral but we did want to keep going. She said she had another referral for us if we were interested but that it was in another region which would mean moving all our paperwork again. We are fine with that and we just want to get things going again. So she emailed me the photos and medical information for two girls.

I had barely opened the emails and was looking through them getting ready to call Shelly and tell her I was going to forward the information on to her when the Russian Program Director for our agency calls me. Right off I thought this was odd, she has not called before. She said the referral should not have been sent to us. They wanted us to stay in the Kaliningrad region and she was confident that we would get a referral quickly from that region.

Staying in Kaliningrad does have its benefits. Our paperwork is already there so that helps move things along and the region is generally faster than many of the other regions.

I wanted to know when we would get another referral though. She said that the regional representative for the agency was meeting with the minister of education the next day and asked that we hold off on considering the new referral until then. She told me she would call the following day (Tuesday) with more information.

On Tuesday she does call back and says that there were going to be twin boys becoming available at the end of this month. They had not yet been on the Russian database long enough to allow them for international adoption but at the end of the month they will be available. Since they were not officially available yet she could not pass on any photos or information about them. She did tell me their age, which was enough for me to search for them myself on the Russian database. There was only one set of boys who matched her description of age and location on the database.

I called Shelly and told her I was going to email her their photos. My initial reaction was honestly not good and she got back to me quickly and she saw the same things in the photos as I did. These boys had all the classic signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. And probably to the most severe degree that I have seen. We are willing to deal with a lot of stuff but alcohol exposure to a fetus can cause brain damage. That is one thing we are not up for. This was an easy decision for us, we were going to turn this referral down.

We decided to send the medical information for the referral of the girls we received on Monday to a doctor. We had not told the agency yet about the boys and wanted to look into the possibility of the girls.

I called our consultant Wednesday and told her our decision on the boys. She had not seen the photos herself and I emailed her a link. She agreed and said she saw what we saw in their photos. We talked about staying in Kaliningrad and to be honest there are good reasons to stay but then we would have to give up on the referral of the girls that we were not supposed to have gotten. While waiting to hear back from the doctor about the girls she would be checking to see if anything from Kaliningrad was coming available soon.

I talked to our consultant again on Thursday and told her the doctor got back to us and he had some requests (better and higher resolution photos) and follow up questions about the girls. I passed this on to our consultant and we will see if we can get them answered. She didn't have any information yet about the Kaliningrad region or if there would be anything available soon. She thought that by Monday she will know more.

What a crazy week this has been.

Back in the queue

2009-09-11T15:38:00.002-04:00

I said a couple weeks ago that we were on hold for our referral. It seems the girl's aunt had visited them and they needed to find out if that means she was interested in them or not. Apparently she is very interested and so that means we have lost them.

I would love to ask this aunt why she let them sit in an orphanage this long and is just now ready to take them home. We of course wish nothing but the best for these girls and hope that this works out for them.

Our consultant asked if we would be ready for another referral should she get one and I told her that we certainly want to keep going. She thought that she may have something for us in a couple weeks. I hope she is right although I have found that you can usually double or triple the estimates that we get.

So we are back in the queue and waiting again.

On hold

2009-08-28T09:23:00.002-04:00

Yesterday our consultant called to update us. We had thought we were going to be traveling by now or at least have some travel dates but we have run into a snag. The girls aunt recently visited them at the orphanage. So now they are in the process of contacting her to see if she has any interest in caring for the girls. We could lose the referall if she is willing and able to take them in. Our consultant expects to know more in a week.

If she is able to take them in at least we are getting this out in the open now before we get any further along. We knew all along that after we actually made the first trip and once we officially said yes they would have contacted the girls relatives to make sure that none of them were interested in taking them in themselves.

Still waiting for our travel date

2009-08-24T12:44:00.002-04:00

We are still waiting for our travel date. I am not sure why it is taking this long. They have known for six weeks that we would like to travel to meet these girls but still no travel date. We knew when we got the referral that we would not be traveling until sometime in August but now we are just hoping for sometime in early September. Our consultant said in an email this morning that she anticipates getting the dates soon but she is not certain.

We are getting what we can done on our side. Our home study was updated with copies going to Russia and U.S. Immigration. We also had our fingerprints taken again last week by U.S. Immigration and already got an updated I-171H reflecting that the fingerprints came back good.

We are getting the bedroom ready for the girls. The room has all new flooring in it now and this past weekend we painted it. Shelly is our master painter so she did most of that work. The weekend before we bought a bunch of different sample jars of paint and I think we painted seven different colors on the wall. I had picked out some pinks and Shelly's colors were mostly lavender. Shelly thought the pinks were too girly so we went with one of the lavenders. It came out really nice.

We now need to figure out some furniture for the room. If everything goes right we should have them home when they are about 24 or 25 months old. The first thing is to figure out the bed situation. We want something that will work for them now and for years to come.

a little at a time...

2009-08-03T17:31:00.002-04:00

Things are moving along. We don't have an official travel date yet but we may be traveling by the end of August or early September. At least that is what we were told today by our consultant today.

Our home study was updated again last week. I am waiting for the agency to call to say it is ready so I can pick it up and get it apostiled and also mail off a copy to US immigration.

We also have a appointment in two weeks with immigration to get our fingerprints taken again. Our old ones just expired and we got the appointment in the mail last week.

I still need to update the paperwork to show we do indeed live in the house we claim to live in. :) I have done this before but this region needs things done a little differently. I stopped into city hall today but the person with the "title" I need to fill out the paperwork is on vacation until next week. No biggie. We will get it done still in plenty of time.

Things are coming together. We just want to book those tickets now and get over to Russia.

Getting stuff done

2009-07-20T16:26:00.002-04:00

Shelly and I worked on the girl’s room over the weekend. Currently it is our guest room and has a queen sized bed in it. We started clearing the room out on Saturday with the idea of getting some work done on it. We remodeled the house a couple years ago and it was the only room that wasn't touched. It is the only room in the house with carpet in it (from before I moved in several years ago). We are going to have it taken out and redo the floors. After that we plan on painting and then we need to buy some furniture more suitable for children. It feels good to be working on this room for them.

We took a copy of our 1040 forms to the bank to have them notarized over the weekend. It seems this region needs them. I also found out today I need to redo some other paperwork (proof of housing) that this region requires to be done in a different format from the last region we were registered in.

I have been pushing to get out home study updated. It needs to be redone to reflect that our referral is for twins. I warned our consultant today that I am going to be a real pain because I plan on staying on top of things and really pushing to get things done in a timely fashion.

Updating paperwork

2009-07-13T16:58:00.002-04:00

So our consultant contacted me today and told me how she wants our paperwork updated. While our initial application and questionnaires did say we wanted two children it did not specifically say we would be open to twins. So I redid that paperwork today so it matches our referral. I called Shelly and she will go into work late tomorrow so that we can go and get this notarized in the morning and then I will get it apostilled and drive it to our consultant's office. Since we are changing regions our consultant wants to get this in ASAP.

We also need to have our home study updated. While it says that we are approved for two children it says that they must be at least 9 months apart. So it is going to be redone to allow for twins. It also needs to be updated for new wording that USCIS requires.

I put in a call to the accountant we used to do our financial statement last fall. We are going to redo it since we finally sold the house Shelly had before we were married. That's a big change in our favor for the financial statement.

I also filled out the paperwork so that the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) can redo our fingerprints. While the initial approval does not expire until December the fingerprints we had taken expire next week.

We got a referral

2009-07-09T13:03:00.005-04:00

Yesterday our consultant called and said she had a referral for us. This was a big surprise. We were told during the conference call last month that this is the slow period in Russia and that we shouldn't expect much until summer is over. Hopefully we are finally seeing a little light at the end of the tunnel.

As many of you know we have been at this a while and have been waiting and hoping for a referral for two children. Well this referral was for twin girls who are about 20 months old. We got a couple pictures of them and they look great. We can't tell if the are identical twins or not although they do look a lot alike. The medical information we got with them was pretty brief and basic but it was also very encouraging. They look like two great little girls. We told our consultant this morning that we want to travel and meet them.

If you notice over on the right side it no longer gives time and weather conditions for Arkhangelsk. That's because the girls are in a different region. They are in Kaliningrad. Our agency is getting us registered in this region now. For those that don't know, Kaliningrad is a region west of Russia and is actually north of Poland and west of Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

Now we wait. We won't be traveling until sometime next month at the earliest. Until we actually have them anything can happen. The wait until now has been hard, I think it just got harder now that we have said we want to go and meet them. We are excited, we can't wait to book those tickets.

Conference Call

2009-06-11T07:22:00.002-04:00

Yesterday our agency conducted a conference call for families that are waiting for their referral. It was similar to the one we had in January but had some updated information and was conducted by the Russian program director for our agency.

I found out that there are 4 families like us waiting for two children. We have been talking about dropping down to just one child to help things move along and she did mention that there are currently no families waiting for a single child either a boy or girl over 24 months of age. I guess if we get to the point where we just needed things to happen we have this option. We really would like two children though so the kids can have the experience of having a sibling like Shelly and I have and if we drop down to one I don't know if we would be able to do this again in the future.

We also heard recently that many regions were becoming more restrictive on the medical exams needed by the parents before adopting. You would need to see specialist in a bunch of different fields. Luckily our region is one where you can have things signed off by your own doctor and you don't have to see all these specialist or have tons off tests done which could have really added up in cost.

She did have also have a lot of statistics on how many families have received referrals this year, traveled to Russia and had their court dates. It does sound like things have been moving along and this was encouraging. She did warn us that we are coming up on the Russian vacation season and that things will slow down for the next couple months but they usually get a large number of referrals after this season is over.

Waiting Families Meeting

2009-06-04T07:32:00.004-04:00

Last night we went to another waiting families meeting. We have been going to these for 1 1/2 years now and while the information was good it did seem to be a rehash of things we have heard many times before.

I don't know if we are going to go to another one of these. It was hard. None of the families that started with us are going anymore as many have brought their children home already. It was hard to hear the stories of people who started after us and already have their children or are waiting for their second trip. I think the tipping point was one woman who when we did our introductions said she had five biological children and was waiting to bring a boy home from Russia.

We did get a chance to talk to our coordinator. She replaced our first one several months back. Shelly had never met her before so I think it was good for them to meet. She did still feel very positive that things were going to happen soon. But of course she has little control over it and is waiting to hear from Russia for any real news. Hopefully she is right. :)

Our new camera

2009-05-11T09:28:00.002-04:00

I have not posted in a while. To be honest getting the referral and then having to turn it down took its toll. I had been planning on getting a video camera to take with us on our trip but we had held off on getting one until getting a referral. Last month when we got the referral I went out and bought the camera.

I have never had a video camera and I already have a nice SLR for still pictures. Shelly had a video camera but after looking it over I knew I needed an upgrade. Hers is a nice camera for when she bought it but it is not high definition and I wanted a HD camera. The difference between a high definition picture and standard definition picture is so huge and of course HD is now the standard so taking video with an old SD camera was not going to cut it. :)

Last Christmas I put a bunch of accessories for the camera on my wish list and had all the extras I needed such as an extra battery, memory and lens filter. All I needed was the excuse to get the camera. I bought the Canon HFS 100. It is a nice camera and takes great video. I am still leering the features on the camera but so far I really like it.

Now when we do go to Russia I will be able to take some video. I am sure some day the children will enjoy seeing that.

A difficult decision

2009-04-14T23:28:00.008-04:00

It has been more than a week since our announcement that we received a referral. We could not have been more excited and we started thinking about an upcoming trip to Russia right away. We jumped the gun and I guess we got ahead of ourselves.

When you get a referral you get some medical information about the children and some photos. We passed this information onto a doctor who specializes in evaluating internationally adopted children. We got the opinion back from the doctor and to be honest I think we were in a bit of denial. We waited this long for a referral, these children were so cute and we so badly wanted to go and meet them.

I am not going to go into what the doctor said but it did give us pause. We still didn't want to give up though and had a second doctor look over the information we had. Unfortunately the second doctor's opinion was the same. We asked follow up questions just to make sure we understood everything. So two doctors, one here in the U.S. and another in Russia came back with the same conclusion, and their conclusion was one of the few things we had said before we got a referral would keep us from going forward. Even so the decision was not an easy one, we struggled with it, but I know in the end it was the right choice for us.

I talked to our consultant today and told her we were going to turn down the referral. I had talked to her several times over the course of the last week and a half and she knows the roller coaster we were on and was very supportive of us.

So we are waiting again. Our name is back in the hat and we hope to get another referral soon. It could be months or even longer, who knows how long it will before we are at this point again and faced with this decision. Hopefully, with any luck, the next time will turn out better.

Paused

2009-04-07T22:23:00.002-04:00

We said we were going to tell the agency that we were ready to go ahead with everything on Monday. We were contacted by the doctor in Russia who we want to help us evaluate the girls Saturday night and she said she would do a preliminary examination of the information we already have and give us her opinion before we travel. Her cost was very reasonable so we jumped at the opportunity. We are still waiting to hear back from her, she initially thought that she was going to be done today but we have not received her report yet. We have heard very good things about this doctor from some of the other families that have adopted from Russia so we feel really good about using her to help us out.

We got THE call

2009-04-04T07:15:00.008-04:00

Thursday morning I got a call from our consultant at the adoption agency. They usually communicate via email so when I saw on the caller ID the name of the agency I knew something was up. Our consultant didn't waste any time and said she had a question for me. As many of you know our preferences are to adopt two children at once and we had indicated that we would like a boy and a girl. So she asked if we would be open to adopting two children of the same gender which we of course were and then she said she had a referral for two girls and that they were biological sisters. One is three years old and the other 16 months. I told her that we would be very interested and she offered to email me a brief medical history and some photos.

I am not sure how many times I hit the "Check Email" button in my email application but I know it was a lot. Thankfully it didn't take her very long to send it. I very quickly looked it over and immediately gave Shelly a call at work. I think she was very much caught by surprise by the news and quickly started looking for my email.

We have read through the information on the girls so many times and looked at the pictures over and over again since we received them on Thursday. We talked it over Thursday night and then again last night over dinner. Friday is our date night. We make a point of going out to dinner on Friday nights and of course last night the girls dominated our conversation. We decided we want to go to Russia and meet these girls. I will call the agency on Monday and let them know.

We are of course very excited and then again very anxious at the same time. We have a long way to go still. We have a lot of little things before we travel but our next big step is to actually travel to Russia to meet the girls. We plan on bringing a doctor with us to meet the children, I think we have found one from the St. Petersburg area that will travel to Arkhangelsk.

We have been working toward this for a long time, and we still have some hurdles to clear, but we can't wait to get on a plane to Russia.

Paperwork update time

2009-03-26T08:34:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I went to the Secretary of State and had 29 documents apostilled. For those that don't know what that means it is where they verify that the notary on our documents is legit. These were all documents we have done before, our paperwork was done a year ago and after a year it needs to be redone.

When I dropped off the paperwork at the agency I was able to meet our new consultant. She is very nice and she will be very easy to work with. We talked about our status and where we are in the process. Unfortunately there is nothing that we or she can do to get things going any faster. We are waiting on the people in Russia to make a match.

Agency Update

2009-02-23T22:10:00.003-05:00

Last month I said how our agency was having financial problems. They added a new fee and needed at least 75% of us to pay it. Well we just got an update from them and they said 86% paid the fee so they ended up above their minimum target. They also said they had a dramatic increase in birth mothers calls to the agency and that their numbers for domestic adoption are way up from how things were going last year. They also had 16 children come home in January internationally. So at the moment they are doing a lot better.

We also found out last week that our consultant was moving over to the domestic adoption side of their agency. This really should not make a lot of difference for us since what we are waiting on is for a match to be made in Russia. Our consultant really did not have any pull in that.

Russian Phrases for Children

2009-01-27T10:06:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I bought this book "Russian Phrases for children" on Amazon. It is just barely over 40 pages long and a pretty small format at that but it seems like it will be a great resource for the adoption. Since our age range for the children is up to 3 years old, this would certainly be useful for us.

It contains a couple hundred phrases that we may want to say to the children. You get two identical books (one for each parent) and a CD. The CD has a man and a woman each saying the phrases in both Russian and English. These two are both native speaking Russians so you hear the words the way somebody in Russia would say them.

The phrases are things you may say to your child. The first section is simple greetings and polite words such as hello, please and thank you. There is a section of reassuring words and another on interacting with your child and of course one on the important yes/no questions such as "are you hungry?" or "do you have to go to the bathroom?".

This CD won't help you order dinner at a restaurant or even have a normal conversation with an adult but it will give you the basics to communicate with your child.

Trying out a new look

2009-01-24T17:37:00.003-05:00

Just trying out a new look for the blog. I don't know how long we will keep this one. Hope you all like a little pink...

Our meeting and conference call

2009-01-13T21:29:00.003-05:00

So I mentioned last week that we had a meeting to go to this week with our agency. The meeting was last night and the room was packed with other families who are adopting. Like I said before the adoption agency is having some financial problems and this meeting was so they could let us know where they stand and what plans they have for the future. They have been hit by the economy too which means they had a lot less people sign up in 2008 and with the adoptions slowing down in some countries it really has had an impact on them. It sounds like they let a lot of people go last year but that still has not made up for the decrease in adoptions. So they are going to implement a new fee which we were pretty much expecting from them and to be honest we thought it could be a lot worse. They said if at least 75% of the families do pay this fee then they would be ok. People who don't pay the fee are dropped from the program. They are also going to focus more on charitable contributions. They are a non-profit, and said they will ask previous families to make donations. They also passed out a form for us to fill out so we could provide names of family or friends who may be interested in donating to them, we didn't fill it out and I don't think we have any intention on providing them with any names at this time.

We did get a chance to talk to our consultant and the woman who did our home study was there too. We were also able to talk with several other families who are adopting. We talked with a couple who was adopting from China who have been waiting for three years now (the China program has really slowed down). I also talked to another couple who is adopting from Ethiopia. They live just on the other side of town from us. After the meeting we were able to talk to a couple we met last year when we initially started and they introduced us to a woman from New Jersey who is also registered in Arkhangelsk just like us. It was great to talk to all these other people who are traveling down the same road.

Today we had a conference call with the woman who is the Russian program director for our agency. This call was intended to help us get ready for our referral. They have a referral packet available on their website which contains all sorts of information on the referral process and to be honest I think I have read it at least four times now. There was not a lot of new information in this call but I guess it is one more step in the process. It sounds like there is another conference call some time after the first trip to help up prepare for court.

Merry Christmas

2009-01-07T22:40:00.003-05:00

Today (January 7th) is Christmas. At least this is the day that the Russian Orthodox church celebrates Christmas. From the way I hear it Russia pretty much shuts down the first couple weeks of January for the holidays much like we do at the end of December.

This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDzzlf99JBI was being passed around on a message board I visit for Arkhangelsk adoptions. It has nothing to do with adoption but is a video which shows the Arkhangelsk region.