You Tube video

Below I thought I'd share a video I found on You Tube (you have to double click on it and it will bring you to You Tube to watch it). It's great for us parents in waiting as it illustrates the feelings a child has leaving the orphanage. It gets me thinking of how hard it will be if our little guy is very upset to leave the place he has known all his life while we will be so thrilled to finally have him in our arms. In thinking about it I think we will have to acknowledge the loss or grief that our child may be having despite all of our excitement. It is not easy to think of it this way...I want to picture our little one clinging to us with happy smiles, sharing the same joy we will have. Anyway...just some random thoughts. Not much new on the adoption front although in the past week I have received emails from two different couples in Minnesota also adopting from Russia AND who have been assigned to our region - Tver. One of the couples submitted their dossier shortly after we did so there is a good chance we will be traveling together. We are hoping to meet up with them next time we are near Minneapolis. It will be great to keep in contact with each other as we wait and hopefully as our sons grow.

International Adoption Workshop (intro)

We have no news on the adoption front but not a day goes by that were not thinking of our future son who is waiting for a family - below is a poem I found today:

KISSES IN THE WIND

I hold you in my heart and touch you in my dreams. You are here each day with me, at least that's how it seems.

I know you wonder where we are... what's taking us so long. But remember child, I love you so and God will keep you strong.

Now go outside and feel the breeze and let it touch your skin...Because tonight, just as always, I blow you kisses in the wind.

May God hold you in His hand until I can be with you. I promise you, my darling, I'm doing all that I can do.

Very soon, you'll have a family for real, not just pretend.

But for tonight, just as always, I blow you kisses in the wind. May God wrap you in His arms and hold you very tight. And let the angels bring the kisses that I send to you each night.
--- Unknown

busy, busy

I wish there was more to post on the adoption front. I did speak with our adoption consultant last week and she assured me that despite the slow down in our region they did not anticipate moving us regions. The hard thing for us to swallow is that our region may no longer be waiving the 10 day waiting period (for those of you not obsessed with the Russian adoption scene - there is a 10 day waiting period after you adopt your child that the judge may or may not choose to waive). In the past Tver has been a region which nearly always waived that extra 10 days however they have switched judges and this might not be the case anymore. The hardest part about that will be leaving our daughter for an EXTRA 10 days...I can't imagine how difficult that will be. Life outside of adoption has been busy. I have started my last semester of grad school and am back to a full work schedule. So I leave the house at 7am and do not return until 9pm most nights - with the exception of a quick occassional dinner. December 10th will be a happy day for me!!

Yeah PBS!

This Friday PBS will be airing the first in a two part series on "Arthur" in which Arthur's friend becomes a big brother when his parents adopt a little girl from China. The producers spent hours with families who have adopted. Yeah PBS! (For show times check out www.pbskidsgo.org/arthur )

IAD (Intl. Adoption Doctor) and other stuff

So we have done some searching lately for an international adoption doctor. Services seem to vary greatly from hiring a doctor to come to the orphanage to using an array of procedures to tell if the child has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We have decided to use the University of Minnesota's adoption clinic (http://www.med.umn.edu/peds/iac/home.html). They have a great repuatation and are easy access to us. I have also been in recent contact with a doctor there who is doing research on children under 3 adopted from Eastern European countries. We are not sure whether we will participate in that. We are glad to have made the decision about who to go with however do not yet know to what extent we will use them (for instance - we haven't decided if we will have the child examined for FAS features). Not a lot new on the adoption front - often people in Russia take vacation for most or all of August so we are hoping and praying things will pick back up in September. We are a little discouraged that our region has been very inactive. As Rachel said to me in an email earlier today, "this process is not for the faint of heart". So true!

In other news we have been keeping busy with many house projects...some planned and some not. We PLANNED on painting our kitchen cabinets, walls and living room and did complete this massive undertaking :). We DID NOT PLAN on our electricity in half the house to stop working and for the septic to give...long story short our very nice friends Kami and Chad (an electrician) came over and for the mere price of pizzas spent hours looking into our electrical problem. Well...we ended up finding a "secret room" attached to our closet which had a light dangling from it and burned some wires - we could have lost our whole house!! The septic is another story - the roots to our neighbors large tree have dug into and pierced a whole in our septic line - part of which is under the house!! So...needless to say most our labor day weekend has been spent digging! At least we had good weather! I am also getting preparing to go back to school...the next few months will be very busy for me as I work on my last semester of grad school :) and my workload heads into full force. The good thing about that is that when I am that busy time will seem less until we meet our son!