We're one day away from court, and our son!!
Ok, now that that happy news is out of the way, heres whats been going on in the past few days.
We left Monday for our 3 hour trek to the village that our baby home is in. We got there in the early afternoon and they immediately brought him to us. We hung out with him for a while until the director of the baby hospital/home came and visited with us. We gave her our final gifts, 4 knitted handmade baby blankets done by my mother and godmother and about 75 pairs of socks. The socks were from the baby shower. We asked everyone attending to bring a package as a gift for the baby home. Everyone loved being able to participate!
Back to our story ...
We hung out with the baby and went for a walk (and a late lunch) late in the afternoon. We discovered that he doesn't like having the sun in his eyes ... it made him cry. I made a mental note to myself that I need to buy him sunglasses.
He's grown taller but it doesn't look like he's gained much weight. I think he's going to be tall and skinny later on.
The baby home has just started him on solid foods. We had the opportunity to feed him while we were there, sometimes with some success, and other times, with no success. It should be interesting to see what happens once we get our paws on him. Hopefully he'll eat everything in sight, and gain back that cute little Budda belly that he had last time we were here.
He surprised us when he showed us that he can pull himself up on the side of the crib (oh crap, now we have to re-adjust the mattress height in his crib at home) and he actually walked along the length of the crib as long as he continued holding on. His preferred method of transportation is crawling. For a baby that was just starting to crawl when we saw him 12 weeks ago, he's learning things by leaps and bounds.
Right now his favorite toys are a cute rattle, some stacking cups and a little teddy bear. We brought some others, but those seem to hold his attention the longest. We brought a stuffed Cookie Moster, but he's really too big and heavy for him to hold for too long a time. He did use him as a pillow, though! It was so cute! The little teddy bear I found at Babystyle (
http://www.babystyle.com/common/search/search_results.asp?adv=1&sort=P&searchtext=teddy+bear+mini+barry&grp=0&prc=0&sze=0 ). I would highly recommend this bear for any baby, as it is small enough and light enough to fit in their tiny grips.
So all told, we spent 3 days with him. We were told that we will need to add up all the hours that we've spent with him from both trips and be prepared to tell that number to the court. We're pretty sure its over 50!
We got back to the hotel in Vladivostok last night and after taking showers, we went right to dinner. We ended up hanging out with several other families that were in various stages of their 10 day wait. It was good to hear their experiences about their adventures. We finally left after 4 hours of that because we were simply exhausted. All this travelling and emotional upheval is very wearing on a body, and we just about collapsed when we got back to the room. I got a full 8 hours of sleep and feel like a new person.
Today we'll have a meeting with our coordinator who will prep us for court. Once that is done, the rest of the day is ours. Since it takes the better part of an afternoon to wash and fix my hair, I might do that. (My hair is rather crazy that way.)