To Russia for waiting

Well, we got word today that our documents are being sent to Russia. They have assigned us a region of Russia to where they are sending our documents. We have been assigned the region of Vladivostok. This is one of the most common regions for families to be receive their referrals from, as they are currently processing very quickly. We have to rush to get a document filled out and signed for the Vladivostok region. It is my understanding that there are many orphanages in this region. I spoke with a family in the beginning of they process and they adopted three beautiful children from this region. They all had blonde hair, which is surprising to me considering the region is most definitely in Asia.

I am excited to get this news because now I know where our little girl will come from and also where we will be traveling to. I looked it up, and Vladivostok is in eastern Russia, near China, Korea, and Japan. This is a little sad to me because when we fly we have to 1st fly to Moscow to get some paperwork done in the capital....a little out of the way. It's like saying, "well, I have to fly to Rome first, just to fill out paperwork, and then I'll fly to Chicago to get the child." We met a flight attendant on our trip to Peru who was Russian and she said that if we fly through Alaska, it won't be too bad but that if we do indeed have to fly to Moscow, which I think we do, we're looking at about a 10 hour flight to get from the states to Moscow and then another 10 hour flight to get to the region where we need to go. Oh, and we're planning on bringing both boys with us. Awesome. And, the average temperature in January is about 8 degrees. I think in August it's 69 degrees. So if we go any time from October through April (how can you not when you take two trips) we will freeze our tails off.



Never a dull adventure in our family, and this will be no different. I am still so excited to know where our little girl will be coming from. So now we fill out a few more forms, including our immigration forms for us and our daughter. And then we wait. They have told us the wait for a young girl (and we have stressed we will not accept a referral for a girl over 14 months due to the complexities of adopting older children) is 6-9 months, but sometimes is shorter. I think they are always so conservative when they give people times because it is so hard to predict. I am not going to start "counting" our months until mid January because of the Christmas holidays things move very slowly.

And so...for the next couple of weeks we hurry up. Then we wait.

In other news, I have been told that the details of the most craziest wedding ever need to be made public. When I have a moment (or ten) I will blog about Matthew's Peruvian adventure, Tim's really (really) bright turquoise shirt, getting attacked by fire ants, mangos falling on the bride, the worlds biggest parenting blunder that resulted in the loss of a wedding ring, and so much more.