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.