Trip 2, Day 5: Passport Photos and more Pizza

Sunday, July 25th

After getting a good night’s rest, we left the air-conditioning in our hotel room for the jungle-like atmosphere of the orphanage. The day was another scorcher, with highs again reaching 97 - 98 degrees Fahrenheit (converting from Celsius isn’t an exact science). Even before we reached the orphanage, we were soaked in sweat. Although we wearing shorts and lightweight shirts, it was hot hot HOT!

Our first activity of the day was getting ‘A’ his passport photos. After sweating on our way to the orphanage, we collected the children and got back into the van. The photo shop we went to was (almost) all the way back at the hotel. Ugh. One of the children (not ‘A’) was very scared of in the van, crying and shaking most of the time. The only other times he had ridden in vehicles was if they were taking him to the doctor’s office.

‘A’ was not scared by the trip. He spent the entire journey looking around, trying to see what was going on in the world around him. We are really hoping that the curiosity holds when he is traveling for 14 hours by train, and 22 hours by plane.

Inside the photo shop, Alan used the belly bubble trick to get ‘A’ giggling right before the picture was taken. Score one for dad! Soon we were heading back to the orphanage for another day full of playtime. Once again, we took care of our little guy for the whole day, including nap time. Here, we ran into our first problem with ‘A’.

Although the caregivers told us that ‘A’ was easy to get down for naptime, he proved to be extremely stubborn during one on one time with us. On the first day, he completely skipped the first naptime session, and tried to play though the second one also. He got very fussy, but anytime we tried to lay him down, he would just roll over and start crawling away. Finally, momma Kathy scooped him up, started walking around with him, and singing him a lullaby. Zonk! He was out within seconds.

On the second day, he again tried to skip naptime. Again, he got more and more fussy, until finally poppa Alan had enough. He picked up ‘A’, laid him down on a fuzzy blanket, and laid still with the little guy. He fought to stay awake, but eventually the Jedi mind tricks that Alan was using worked. Kathy thought it was very cute the way her boys laid together, and took lots of photos.

For lunch, we were looking forward to going somewhere for lunch. No luck, delivery pizza again. While the pizza was good, there were just so many other options we would have preferred. We still didn’t know the exact reason for this, as our interpreter told us it was “too hot in the restaurant for digestion”.

In the afternoon, our coordinator stopped into the room to discuss the “3rd trip”.

For those who don’t know, normally Russian adoptions require 3 trips. The first is to meet the child, and to formally request a court date. The 2nd trip is for the court date, at which time a 10 day waiting period starts. Most families leave Russia during this time, returning for a 3rd trip 10 days later. Because the cost of airline travel to Russia and the jetlag, we decided to make only two trip, staying in Russia between our 2nd and 3rd trips to Kirov.

As our coordinator was laying out the 3rd trip information, we realized that he expected us back in Kirov two days earlier than we had been told by our agency. Kathy had asked many times about this, because according to her calculations, we should have been able to complete our Russia trip earlier than we were told. Now, we were being told that instead of coming back to Kirov overnight on a Sunday, we would come back on a Thursday night.

We had booked our plane tickets and our other activities based on the original information. It now appeared that our St. Petersburg trip was in jeopardy, as our St. Petersburg to Moscow train we would not arrive until 90 minutes before our Moscow to Kirov train left! In addition, we had to decide whether we wanted to stay in Moscow an extra two days with ‘A’, or try to change our flight home from Friday to Wednesday.

The night ended on both high and low notes. We were frustrated that there had been so many changes to the itinerary, both for this trip and our previous one. Each change meant more money spent / wasted on ticket changes, apartment changes & cancellations. On the other hand, we would get to become the parents of our little guy two days earlier than we previously expected. That made the changes worthwhile.