Our first day in Moscow

So - I was wondering how I would make it through a whole day here because we couldn't go to the orphanage until Tuesday. Well - we didn't get up until 11am today so that helped pass part of the day! There is more to it than that... My dear Jeff woke up at 2am and couldn't sleep. He then called home and decided to read for awhile. I woke up and thought someone was in our room not knowing that he was awake. :) We ended up staying awake for awhile and having some of our granola bar stash because we were so hungry. Finally, we went back to sleep around 5;30 or 6am. Funny .

We did some sightseeing today and found the grocery store. This was a nice find because we cannot read anything here. We tried to get dinner last night and ended up at a Sbarros. We just pointed and held up fingers to order. :) i thought that we were going to have to eat Sbarros our whole trip! Oh and we saw a McDonald's too. I am sure that will be one of our meals as well to save money and of course familiarity. Wow - we sure aren't experiencing the culture in our dining! :) So we found rotisserie chicken and waters at the grocery store which was nice to expand our small menu. I will have to work harder at learning Russian for our next trip.

We met up with Kyle and Jene and did some walking and lots of talking about the adoption. We saw the Kremlin and lots of other things that I will have to look up later. Kyle and Jeff decided to practice the metro. How funny it was. They bought tickets and then we rode it one stop to see if we could do it and to see if they were reading it right. What an experience. Jene and I just followed along.

We actually went to a restaurant for dinner - TGI Friday's! Jene and Kyle ate there for lunch so we knew that the menu had English and that they spoke a little bit of English.

Well... Jeff is sleeping so I guess that I should head to bed. Say a prayer for us, we will be heading to the ministry of Education and then meeting our little guy tomorrow. I am not sure many details, we just do what they say and when.

Hopefully, I will have pictures for you tomorrow!

We are here!

So we left Grand Rapids at 1:30pm on Saturday the 27th and arrived at our hotel in Moscow at 6pm on the 28th! What a trip! We are 8 hours ahead of Grand Rapid time, so we are a little off.

The trip was surprisingly smooth. We flew out of Detroit to London and then from London to Moscow. We had a driver that spoke great English waiting for us at the airport holding up our name. We didn't sleep much on the flights. It was tough to sleep since it was so early in the evening for us. It was so tough to sit still knowing that I would meet Konabek in a few days. But I finally relaxed and got some good reading and watched Great Expectations on the plane.

We also had the opportunity to meet the couple that we are traveling with from Bethany. We met them at the Detroit airport. They are adopting a little girl from the same orphanage as us here. Their little girl, Liza, that will be 3 in December. It has been so nice traveling with them. It has been fun getting to know them and it has made parts of the trip less intimidating.

They are staying in a hotel just up the road from us.

We got a call at 8:30pm on Sunday night after we arrived from Olga. She is our contact here in Russia. We will be picked up at 9:15 on Tuesday morning to head to the department of education. I think that they will give us the okay to visit the orphanage that we will then visit the orphanage two times on Tuesday!

The Beginning

Well we are here... It's 4am, I am in a hotel in Moscow, I can't read anything here and my husband woke me up at 2am because he couldn't sleep. LOL All I really want right now is a cup of coffee and breakfast doesn't open for awhile. I am starving but I am not sure when I am supposed to eat my next meal because I can't remember when my last one was. :)

So how did we get here? Well, I never thought 3 1/2 years ago after we had our son that we would be adopting, but here we are. After a year of prayer, we finally decided that adoption was where God is leading us. It definitely wasn't without hesitation or fears, but this is one of those times that God had other plans.

We started our application with Bethany in January of this year - 2008. Our application was accepted and we chose Russia as our adoption country. It took us until the end of May to get all of our paperwork together to submit our application to Russia. The day that I called Bethany and told our caseworker that we had everything and that we were ready she said told us about this new adoption program in Moscow. They had heard recently from their contact in the country that they had 3 young children ready to be adopted and were we interested? Well yes - so we had to quickly change our application to match the requirements for this country and we turned our application packet in!

A week and a half later, our caseworker called us. They had a referral already! He is a little boy. His name is Konabek. He turned one on July 24 of this year! How lucky we are! We happened to be camping at the time in Traverse City. Our caseworker who lives in the TC area stopped by on her way home for the weekend. She went through the paperwork and brought us a video clip of him. What a cutie! We couldn't do anything until they called us back with our dates that we would travel.

In the beginning of September we received a call that we had our travel dates and to make travel arrangements. Our first trip is to be 9/27 - 10/3. We will be heading to the orphanage on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of that week and heading home on Friday.

I am excited about the trip and excited to meet our new little boy but my heart aches to leave Noah at home. I think the trip would be too much for him and that he would have more fun at home. They also don't recommend bringing him - since the purpose of the trip is to meet Konabek. Understandable, but not easy.