*** IT'S A GIRL!!! ***

The story is below, but here's the important stuff!






Today was a strange and wonderful day!

We were told last night, when we talked to our facilitator here, that she would get in touch with us sometime today, but not before 10am. She was not sure if we would be able to meet another child right away or not. Keeping in mind that she could call right at 10am, I made sure to get up a little before that (hey, I'm jet-lagged, give me a break!) and it’s a good thing I did. The phone rang at 9:55 and it was the front desk calling, saying “We need to give you a message that a woman will be picking you up in 20 minutes.” Wow! OK. So Rob sprung out of bed and got ready, and within 20 minutes we were in the lobby, hoping that the person who would pick us up would be someone familiar J Fortunately, it was indeed our facilitator. She does not speak much English and I guess she thought it would be easier to leave a message at the desk than to call us (or to have her interpreter call us – the interpreter comes with us for all official business).

We got in the car, wondering what might be happening today (you sure do have to go with the flow here). Of course, she couldn’t tell us too much given the language barrier…but what she did say told us what we needed to know: “Today…look…girl.” A girl?! We had been told when we switched to this region the first time that there was absolutely no chance of getting a girl. (This was fine with us, though we hoped someday to have a girl.) For some reason, girls are more likely to be adopted by Russians. A very young girl is particularly unlikely to be referred to an American couple. How old was she? How is it that she is available?

Well, we’d have to wait to find anything out. We first picked up the social worker at the court house (she is called “the inspector”). This woman will be vouching for us in court when we come on the second trip. She met us yesterday and said she was very happy with our interaction, but I guess she needed to come today too. So then there were 4 of us in the car, but Rob and I were still the only English speakers! We headed out toward the interpreter’s apartment to pick her up (yay!) and when she got in the car, our facilitator gave her a document to tell us about the child. It told us only her birth date and her given name. She was born in June 2007. Under a year old! [As for her name – we haven’t decided yet on a name and we need to do that tonight before signing documents tomorrow. We haven’t thought through girl names yet because we were sure it would be a boy! I decided to post this other stuff to the blog even though we won’t post her name until tomorrow because I didn’t want to make you wait for us.]

We arrived at the orphanage and, like yesterday, immediately donned the disposable plastic “socks” (they go over your shoes, to keep the floors clean). We then met with the orphanage director and doctor before meeting the baby. The first information we got really scared us – this little girl was born very, very prematurely (about 2 pounds at birth). However, the remainder of the report suggested that she seemed to be recovering well from her rough start. We were still nervous. They brought her in and we started holding her and playing with her. She was adorable! We got to play with her for about 45 minutes and had a great time. But we were still cautious because we knew we’d need to wait to hear from our U.S. adoption specialist about her health situation.

We got back to our hotel and immediately sent the new information to our doctor via online submission (he is at the University of Minnesota International Adoption Clinic – they are one of the best). Bless him, he wrote back to us within just a couple of hours. His report was positive! He essentially said that given her difficult start, she was doing very well and was on target for a premature baby girl of her age.

We needed a little time to take this all in! In less than a day things had totally turned around. It was a little overwhelming. We talked for a little bit, and then just sat quietly for a little bit, before preparing to call our interpreter (who would then call our facilitator) and say that we wanted to adopt this baby girl. Just as we were about to call, the phone rang – it was our adoption agency caseworker back in the U.S., checking how our day went today (she had called last night as well to check on us). It was great to share the good news with her first! She then went ahead and offered to call our facilitator here directly since she speaks Russian. She asked if we could email her a picture of the baby so she could enjoy the moment too J I had to send her 4 because I couldn’t narrow it down!

So, we hope to visit her again tomorrow – the orphanage has some kind of inspection or official business going on tomorrow so they may or may not be able to have us visit in the afternoon. Please pray we can get over there and see her again! If we do, we will post more pictures tomorrow.

As for the rest of our trip…on Thursday early morning we leave on the train for Moscow (4 hour trip) and will have doctors’ appointments on Friday before leaving Saturday. Time flies! We look forward to getting home and starting the next part of the wait.

One more for those who can't get enough....