Tuesday was...

a bit different from what we expected. We started our day getting few more things from the grocery store and came back quickly because it was FREEZING! Weather.com said it was 7 oF, but with wind chill it was - 17 oF!!! We had our food in our room and then waited until we were picked up to go to the Cosmonautic Museum here in Kaluga. As Mark put it, the museum is the only landmark in Kaluga that you can find in google earth, so we were offered to go, we accepted.

Both Mark and I are engineers, so when Nadya was explaining all the history of the russian man called Tsolkosky (spelling?) who spent years and years in Kaluga working on the formula for launching a rocket, it initially sounded interesting. Well, 1 hour later I had had my "engineering fix" and was ready to go to the baby home! Well, we found out that Nadya was a young pioneer and LOVES all things related to the cosmonaut history!! So unfortunately, we were late at the baby home.

We got there and the caregivers said our baby was anxiously waiting for us. She was wearing an adorable outfit with blue jeans, yellow shirt and a green hoody. We went again to the gym and spent about 1.5 hours with her, but she seemed on an off a bit grumpy and kept trying to put ANYTHING in her mouth, including our fingers! She looked sleeping sometimes, so at 2:30 pm we gave her back to her caregiver and left.

Then we went to the souvenir shop right next to restaurant The Wall, but didn't end up buying anything because even though it had the sign for credit cards on the door, it only takes cash and we didn't have enough money. We had lunch and walked few blocks to the hotel.

At 6 pm we were picked up again. This time Margarita was also waiting for us at the lobby and brought some documents for us to sign. At this point we realized that we were not required to meet with the MOE at all, because they had already granted the permission to meet our baby. So we headed back to the baby home. Our baby had just finished her dinner and we ALL headed back to the gym. Yes, I said all, because Nadya also came with us and while one of us hanged out with our baby, the other was signing papers. And when both of us were done signing papers, she then stayed with us and started chit chatting. So, yesterday we may have had about 20 minutes of alone time with our baby.

Few things we learned and noticed yesterday. Even within the same agency, things are done differently in each Region. I remember being taken to S's office few evenings after meeting our son in Podolsk to sign papers and other stuff; here you don't go to Margarita's office at all and they ask you to sign papers while you are visiting your child. The other thing we learned is that we just have to ask things when we need to. We didn't want to be rude or anything, so when we got to the hotel at night we called Carol (we used Skype to make calls - it worked amazingly well and we paid 10 cents per minute) to ask if we could request Nadya to give us some alone time when we are visiting our child. Carol said that it sounded reasonable to her, unless there was a requirement at the baby home that we could not be alone with the baby. So, we will ask Nadya today (it is Wednesday here) and we will try to make the best of our time left with our baby, because today is the last day we will be visiting her.

Yeap, today all the official stuff will also happen. We will go to the notary to sign more papers and take our baby out for her passport picture. Funny enough, two years ago I remember being asked for the name we would give to our son - somehow it was necessary for some of the papers we needed to sign or something. Here, they will ask us once we have had our court date and the judge grants the petition to adopt. Different, hum? So we are going to wait until then to share her name. Sorry!

Yes, I need to admit that yesterday I found myself a bit frustrated with how the day went. That's why it took me a while to post. Then I had to remind myself that as in anything in life, we just have to adapt and accept that we don't get our way all the time! We have to be grateful for what we have, and God has given us the amazing opportunity to be parent of a very sweet baby girl, and we are thankful for that! So now, here you get another sneak peak of our baby and few other pics from the museum!