Headed home!

We went for our appointment at the embassy today, and despite the issues we had with some paperwork we passed! I was expecting an interview in an office with someone asking me difficult questions but it was nothing to it at all! I stood at the window and raised my right hand and told them that everything was true and accurate and that was basically it. Way too easy, but after all that we have been through, maybe God was having mercy on me today! The lady came out of the office and spoke with about four families who were there to adopt and told us what to expect with traveling home and more about our embassy paperwork. After that they gave each of us our child's visa and we were on our merry way! Tomorrow our facilitator will pick up our registration to the consulate and then Saturday we are outta here! We will be 1 day shy of being gone 4 whole weeks! Yikes what a crazy time we have had here. Once we are home I will share more about our crazy and terrifying experience we had the first week here! Thanks for all of your prayers and well wishes!

Great news!

We have an appointment with the embassy at11:30 TODAY! I booked our flights home for this Saturday! I am praying and believing that everything will pass at the embassy and we can head for home in TWO days! Some of our paperwork was not correct so I am praying they have mercy on us! Thanks for all of your prayers and sweet comments! I will post and let you know how it goes at the embassy today.

Where are we?

I seriously wish that I could tell you we are home or leaving in the morning for home, but about the best I can say for now is I am picking up Anna's passport tomorrow. Even though I am so VERY thankful that it finally came after THREE weeks, I am so VeRy homesick that it hurts. I am sitting in a hotel room alone and have been crying for about 30 minutes. The tears, they come and they go, but tonight they won't stop falling. I talked to my mother-in-law tonight and she told me something that just broke my heart and I can't seem to shake it. As I have said before and most of you know, our biological daughter who is 11, also has Down syndrome. She is my girl and we are TIGHT! I have been gone for over 3 weeks now and she has no understanding of where I am, what I am doing or when I am coming back. She asks about me every day but as I said she doesn't understand anything that is going on. Sometimes she will talk to me on the phone and sometimes she won't. It upsets her, as well as me, when she will talk to me. I hang up the phone and then I cry. I cry for her , I cry for me. I just want to go home Lord, I just want to go home. We really thought that this THIRD trip would be over in about 2 1/2 weeks. Obviously this didn't happen. Yesterday made three weeks that I have been gone and I haven't even picked up her passport yet. Yes I do pick it up tomorrow and just found out this past Friday that it would be ready tomorrow. But there is still quite a bit to do here before we can leave and I still don't have a date that we can book our flights home :(. Yes we are on the path to leaving but with each day here there is still pain in my heart for my children at home. So about this morning, Ashlyn woke up and yelled for her me maw so that she would know she was awake. When me maw was on her way up she heard Ashlyn saying "mom, I'm waiting, mom I'm waiting." This crushed me when she told me this, because I don't even know if I have ever even heard Ashlyn use the word "waiting" and yet she is waiting on me :( to come home, wherever it is I am. The song " While I'm waiting" by John Waller came to mind and made me cry even harder.

I just keep telling myself that Anna needs a mama too, and a daddy and brothers and a sister, and that it will all be over with soon enough. But the physical pain in my heart sometimes seems unbearable. I just keep thinking that this must be like what God feels in his heart when we are away from him, doing other things in our life that keep us from him. But let me be the first to say that I have been chasing the hem of his garment over here, feeling helpless, hopeless and afraid! I've definitely been praying my way through this and asking God for forgiveness for the fears and weakness that I have been harboring the last several weeks. We were told last week that it could be two more weeks before her passport came in, but praise God we got the call on Friday that it will be ready tomorrow! We were so afraid of running out of money being gone so long,but God answered that prayer too! So in the end God is working everything to the good for those that love him. Please keep us in your prayers, as we need them very much!

I will end by apologizing for not posting very much while we are here, but I have just felt too down in the dumps to even talk about it anymore than I have too!

And if you are wondering why I am in a hotel alone, LOL, my mom stayed with Anna back in Mo$cow so that I could take the three hour tour, LOL, back to her city to pick up her passport. The poor dear has been drug all over Ru$$ia for the past three weeks, she needed a break, although I hear she isn't dealing too well with my absence either :(

Update from the hotel.....

We are still in country waiting on Anna's passport.  Tomorrow will be  a week since we have applied and we are praying that it comes ASAP! Can you believe the people at this hotel let us sit here for 4 days sweating like pigs and dripping wet before they decided to tell us that we have air conditioning in the room? I don't know how we would have made it this long without a/c.  But thank our good Lord above it is nowhere near as hot here as it is back home.  In fact we have had some cloudy, breezy and cool days here that I am so thankful for!  Below are some photo's and things about Miss Anna!

Anna likes to watch Signing Time!

Sweet girl sings in her sleep, for a long time during the night :)

She is also a thumb sucker...I've never had one of those :)

Believe it or not, at 6 years old she is pretty much potty trained.  My bio daughter with

DS was nowhere near being potty trained at 6 years old!  Anna is afraid

of the big toilet so I had to go and buy her a "pot"

When we first got her she stuffed all of the bread she could in her mouth.

I am thinking she was afraid someone was going to steal her bread.  She is a riot...she will take her

thumb and pack the bread on the side of her jaw like a hamster packs food :)

She LOVES to take a bath and I think she would take 20 a day if we let her.

Just being her cute and lovey little self :)

Packing her jaws with goldfish

 .

This is what she does when she gets sleepy or aggravated.

She will suck her thumb and cover her eye with the other hand and

she rocks back and forth, back and forth.  Sometimes it makes me sad :(

If she wakes up in the middle of the night she will sit up in bed and rock herself back to sleep.

She loves to eat!!!!!!!!!  She will lower her head and put her mouth

down to the plate and start shoveling in it.  She is a VERY independent little girl!

I think I will have my morning bread in bed please :)

She is not too crazy about cold stuff.   She hated ice cream at first and

she will tolerate small bites of it now.  It was so funny when she took

her first bite if icecream....she made a face like it was sour and made a gagging action.

  She LOVED this popsicle until she got a big ol' bite

and I think maybe it gave her a brain freeze because she spit it out and wouldn't eat anymore.

She loves to go on rides in the stroller, BUT when the stroller stops she gets angry

and tries her best to climb out!

On our ride leaving the mental institution for the last time ever!!!!

Are you my mama?

I will ask her where's mama and she will pat her sweet little hand on my chest.

She gives the best hugs and kisses.... don't expect less than 40 a day!!!



Anna is doing really great considering we just swooped her away from all she has ever known.  I was a bit worried what would happen that first night we had her and would put her to bed. Would she be sad, scared or confused? No, she didn't appear to be at all.  She acts like she has known us all of her life and she was just waiting on us to come and pick her up and take her home :)  What a love bug she is.  She wants to hug and kiss all the time and I am so happy that she is attaching very nicely to me....she KNOWS I am her mama!!!!  She loves to sit around and be held and loved on, like she just eats it up!

Of course she has some issues that will need to be addressed when we get her home.  She will most likely need glasses, per the orphanage director, so we will get her eyes checked out.  Anna walks with a limp and I am not sure if it is because she had an ankle or foot injury or if it is because her foots turns inward some.  Her poor little skin is in such bad shape and she just claws at it.  My mom and I found our way to a pharmacy to get some cream for it with the help of google translator, LOL.  Oh what an encounter we had on this day with a drunk and crazy Ru**ian lady.  It was a horrible nightmare and I will blog more about that day when we are safely out of this country and back home.  But back to Anna....when she is tired or upset she will start rocking herself back and forth and makes a grunting sound.  This is very typical for orphans because they need some sort of stimulation even as babies and they quickly learn that rocking themselves helps ease some of their frustration and need for stimulation.  Despite her limp, she is a very strong and sturdy little girl who loves to jump.  Our daughter Ashlyn is 11 and so uncoordinated and floppy that she CANNOT jump yet!  Anna has at least 2 cavities and WIGGED out on me the first day I tried to brush her teeth!  She was scared to death, so I am wondering jsut how true the caregivers were about her being able to brush her own teeth. I thought she was going to lay an egg on me when I went to brush them!!!  We have to chase her away from bathroom day and night because she wants to be in the bathtub 24/7.  The child has not had a bath in 6 years, so I guess it does feel pretty good to soak in some good, warm and sudsy water!  She is also an escape artist and we have to build a fort to keep her in the room at night and out of the bathroom just so we can at least sleep with a little peace.  First we block the entry way to the room with a heavy leather chair and then put a big suitcase on top of the chair and a wood chair on top of the suitcase.  We shut the bathroom door at night and put  a heavy table in front of the door and a heavy suitcase on top of that. We had such a scary incident with her waking up and going in to the bathroom while we slept.....I will save that story for later too :(  What a nightmare it was!!!!!  So needless to say we are praying every day that our passport comes back ASAP so that we can get this little girl at home where she will be safe and loved.  We get the most awful stares and glares in the community here when we walk around with her.  The people act like they have NEVER seen a child or person with a disability in their life...and you know what? They probably haven't because they are all packed away in orphanages and mental institutions.  I just look at them and smile :)  I want to make a sign in Ru**ian that says "yes I am beautiful" and tape it to her shirt, ha ha haha!!!!  That would give them something to stare at for sure :)  So if you are reading this and you pray, please pray that God has favor with us and gets her passport to us ASAP and heads us home safely to join the rest of our family back in the good ol' USA who are so excited for our return!!!!

There's one less orphan in the world today......

Today was "GOTCHA DAY" for our sweet Anna.  My mom and I left on Sunday for Russia and arrived on Monday.  It was late in the afternoon when we finally reached our destination and it was too late to go and visit her on Monday.  We had been told that we would go and pick up her birth certificate on Tuesday and then head out to the institution and take her into our custody on that day.  It was a crazy day of running and our facilitator thought that we should wait until Wednesday to take her with us because the passport process would take hours and it would be too much for Anna.  After we got to the institution on Tuesday the assistant director said that we could take her on Wednesday and get her passport picture made then because the weather was too bad (raining) to take her out into.  I was a little aggravated at first but it really was for the best.  It took us at LEAST 5 hours to go through the passport application process today.  I was about to pull my hair out because I was afraid they were going to try and say that it wasn't a good day to take her today either, because it was so late.  When we arrived at the institution we went into the office to talk to the director.  Our facilitator told her that we had more questions about Anna and her routine and the director said "oh I will tell you all of that in two weeks when you come back to get her when her passport is ready". Uhmmmm NO!  We will be taking her today.  She did not agree with us.  She had issues of letting go and she said this is just so weird.  We have never had any adoptions before and I am just not sure how this is supposed to take place.  So then she gets on the phone with her supervisor to find out if she has to let us take her today.  She stated that she could not find anywhere in the papers that say when we are legally allowed to take her, so our facilitator kindly showed her where it stated she is legally ours and that we could take her. So then she had to agree, but with tears, and we were allowed to take Anna from the institution to be with her forever family!!

As we were leaving with her I heard someone yell out "Nastya" (this is her nickname for Anastasia) and we turned around to find a lady with tears pouring down her face as she came over to hug Anna and tell her goodbye.  It was really, really sad. We were told that she was one Anna's caregivers and it was apparent that she loves our little girl.  It broke my heart to see these people so saddened to see our sweet girl go home to her family.  I know that their heart is breaking to lose her but I promised to send them pictures and updates often. They really seem to care for the children and adults that they have in their care and I am grateful to them for taking good care of her.



This sweet girl of mine really is a gem. I honestly could not love her more if she had came from my own body.  I mean fierce, deep love for her like she has always been mine.  Is that abnormal? I don't know.  I have read blogs about families who adopt chilren and they say that it takes time to fall in love with them and I totally can understand that. But what about me? I love her like I gave birth to her. Maybe it's because she was born to be MY daughter. God knew that for whatever reasons her parents had for giving her up, that she would one day be mine.  I think she already knows it too.  She knows that I love her and she appears to love me back :)  I can't tell you how many hugs and kisses I got today because there were too many to count!

The sweet little thing did so good today.  She hopped in the car with us and headed off for her new life like it was something she does every day!  It takes a little over an hour to drive from her institution to the city where we are staying and did all of her paperwork and court.  She did great in the car.  She ate her gummy fruit snacks and guzzled down a whole cup of juice.  She acts so thirsty...I just wonder if she was allowed enough to drink and may be dehydrated some.  Her skin is horrible.  She has sores in her scalp and scratches it like crazy.  But it gets worse.  Her feet make me cringe and I cannot imagine how they must feel.  I don't know if she is allergic to something and her feet are just raw from scratching them OR if she has some type of fungus going on with them.  She just claws at her legs and her hiney like they itch soooo bad.  BUT the child has never had a bath, so you can imagine why her skin is in the shape it is in.  They said that they give them sponge baths and I have no idea how they wash their hair.  So we gave her her first bath tonight and she did pretty well with it.  At first she was hesitant so I sat on the side of the tub and just stood her up in the bath and splashed water on her until she was comfortable enough to sit down in it.  It wasn't long and she was enjoying herself!  We got her out and greased her from head to toe with lotion in hopes that it would help with some of her itching....but I don't think it did :(  She started clawing at her feet and it made my heart hurt so bad for her.  Our facilitator has left to go back to her city while we wait for the passport so we are here trying to make it on our own.  I think we will venture down to the drugstore tomorrow and try to find something for her skin.

After we got back to our hotel we took her to the restaurant for dinner and I was curious to see how she would do with eating.  I had read about children being adopted from orphanages and that they could have a bad relationship with food such as hoarding food and gorging on it.  She did neither...but she does like to eat that's for sure!

We were told that she was potty trained but we brought pullups and diapers just in case.  She wore a pullup most of the afternoon until we could get her back to the hotel and put panties on her.  My mom tried putting her on the toilet and she became upset....afraid of the big girl toilet, ha ha! So we tromped up the street to the mall and found her a small little potty in hopes that this would cure her fear and it did!  She went to the bathroom twice before bedtime.  She has already watched her "signing time" videos and skyped with her brothers and sister.  We went to the mall and the grocery store, came home, took her bath and finally passed out on her little cot bed. I put the sweet baby in the bed with her blanky/teething rings, she layed there for about 5 minutes, then pulled the covers up over her head and went to sleep!!  I know she's over there dreaming now and thinking "please don't wake me....I think I'm in heaven!"

I CANNOT even begin to thank all of you enough who have helped us through this process to make Anna our daughter.  I promise you that we could not have done it without your love, prayers, help and support. You all mean so much to us and we are eternally grateful to each and everyone one of you!  I'm sure that Anna thanks you too! She now has a mommy and daddy who love her so much, and two brothers and a sister who cannot wait until she is home!! May God richly bless you all!!