Short Days - Long Hours

I can't believe tomorrow is the last day we will see Diego! Time has just flew by! Yesterday we went to the orphanage, but the traffic was horrendous and took us double of time than the previous days. We got there and they were feeding Diego, so we peeked in a little while they were feeding him a bottle with some brownish liquid... Then a caregiver that I never saw before brought him to us. We started calling him Vanushka and trying to get this attention, but this time he was really focussed on checking out where his caregiver went! I guess is good that he likes her, but we really wanted some eye-to-eye interaction. So we started playing the little game of lifting him up and down that he really seem to enjoy, like we have done before, but this time, he threw up on me a little. Unfortunately, the "protective" caregiver saw me, scolded me, and asked not to play like that! Everything in russian and with some hand gestures!

We continued playing with few toys, taking pictures, and without noticing, the time was up when our Diego started sucking his thumb and falling asleep on daddy's chest. We gave him back to the protective caregiver (who I found peeking at us several times!) and left. Next stop: the Moscow Regional Court!

Podolsk is south of Moscow, and the court is in a town called Krasnogarsk, which is west of Moscow. Once our guide told us that we understood it would be about an hour and a half car ride!!!! It is just amazing, I think we spend about 50% of the time in the car in crazy traffic or silly right turns (there are hardly any left turns, so sometimes you have to do three right turns to go to the left!!)!! Once we got to the court building, which was a REALLY new, nice, and clean building, it took about 5 minutes to get there, sign our names in a register, and drop our legal petition, including all our dossier docs!

After that I was passing out and dying to get to the appartment, which took at least another hour. Somehow, after we got "home", we found energy to meet Rob and Dede for dinner and had a great time with them! I think they wanted to "party" before their Gotcha Day!

Today our guide took us sightseeing to the Red Square/Kremlin and the inside of the Church of Christ Redeemer. Both the Kremlin and the Church are beautiful! Then we did some shopping and at 1 pm we headed to the Russian Clinic for our 8-doctors medical exam. The exam with all the doctors took about 45 minutes total(it was a piece of cake - all those doctors were really nice!), but before and after we had to do some serious waiting until we got the certificates signed and and stamped. We left the clinic at 4:30 pm! And then, hit the CRAZY traffic of Moscow again!

We got home almost at 6 pm, I made dinner (our dinners have been half out and half in to save some $$) and then head out again! Why? Mission: Diego's birthday celebration!! We decided we wanted to get a card so the caregivers and us can sign it, a little outfit so he would look even cuter in the pictures, and a cake! We headed to Novy Arbat and after finding two baby stores and the supermarket these were your picks:

I am going to bed now! I am sooooo tired and after all these days between the 10 oF and 35 oF, my throught is sore and I think I am finally coming down with something... I hope tomorrow we get some nice pictures for Diego's birthday celebration. It know it will be something pretty simple, but someday, when we will show him the scrapbook with all these memories, we want to make sure he knows he stole our hearts from the very start!!