Rockets

During the summer I was spending a lot of time processing adoption paperwork (and I still have some more to do) but I tried hard to do some fun things with Beth and Luke as well.

One of which was Mark and Luke built a rocket kit that Grandma and Grandpa had given him last Christmas. We then got together with some friends from church who are actively into model rocket building. We had lunch together then an afternoon of launching. It was nice to spend the time with friends. We did learn that Bandit wants nothing to do with the smell or sound of rockets being launched.

















*****Luke with his Rocket ************************* Ready for Launch*****














********** Watching the launch ************************** It flys********


Beth even got into it and launched a couple of rockets. A good time was had by all. In fact I think Santa might just have to have four new rockets in his sack this Christmas (one for each of the kids.) Interested in another launching get together next summer?

Not the Call We Hoped For

I've been wondering how to write this post. I've been thinking about it for a couple days now. You see, we received a phone call from our case worker on Thursday, and it wasn't the call we wanted to hear.

We've been jumping at every ring of the telephone for 3 weeks or so, hoping it would be our case worker telling us of our court date in Stavropol. Our materials have been in for over a month and we were getting antsy.

She called... she said that the court had our paperwork and that our paperwork is all approved (so far so good...). She then said that the court had trouble locating a birth certificate for our kids' biological mother and that it took them a while to get it. As a result, our case was delayed (not so good).

We will not be able to have our court date in September. Also, the judge is taking vacation for the entire month of October. We should expect a court date in early NOVEMBER. At least it might be early November if they are able to put together the schedule before the judge's vacation. There is a chance that they won't create the November schedule until the judge returns from vacation. If so, we'd be going in mid to late November at the earliest. We might not get the kids home before the end of the year if things go slowly at that point. For those of you who keep track of such things, we will have several documents that expire in the first week of November. It looks like we'll have more time and expense to renew them.

Letters to Russia - finding the orphanage's address

It's amazing what you can do with the internet. Really. I can remember when, as a college student, I heard of this new thing called the web that made the internet a lot easier and more interesting to use that just doing ARCHIE and VERONICA searches. I even got a copy of this new program called Mosaic so I could surf... on a 2400 baud modem... blazing fast (or not). That was back before Netscape, before internet explorer and way before broadband... I'm showing my age. Even so, I am still amazed at the things you can do online these days.

We wanted to be able to write and send cards to our kids in Russia. The translator told us that the address of the orphanage was on the adoption agreement... but he never showed us where or told us what it was. The agreement is in Russian. We're trying to learn some Russian, but it's a little tough. There just aren't enough similarities between slavic languagues like Russian and germanic languages like English to make it easy. Needless to say, reading the adoption agreement to find the orphanage address isn't something we could do anytime soon. And than in comes the internet to save the day.

I can read enough Russian to recognize a few words, so I found a part of the adoption agreement that I thought was a good candidate for the address. I went to an online translation site and was able to type (using the Cyrillic alphabet via a Russian keyboard emulator that is on the website) the part of the form I suspected.

It translated to something along the lines of Special Childrens Home for abandoned children and children of parents who do not support them. Obviously the translation was a little awkward, but it was enough. I had the the right part and it included the street name and building number. I was on my way to sending mail to детский дом 12 (children's Home 12) in Stavropol Russia.

Next, I needed to learn how to write an address for mail going to Russia. I found a couple of resources. The first was actually the Russian Postal Service and it was in English. The other was the US Postal Service's international addressing tips page.

I also learned that I needed the postal code (think zipcode). The Russian Postal Service has a page for finding these, but it's not all that user friendly... it's in Russian only. Still, I managed to find the codes for Stavropol. The "Main" post office in Stavropol is 355000. Finding the correct post office for the orphanage was tougher and involved some divine intervention. We were able to decipher from our internet translated adoption agreement that the orphanage was on Trunova Street (ул. Трунова, д.71). It turns out that one of the local post offices is also on Trunova Street. Digging out our map of Stavropol that we bought over there in July, we saw that it wasn't a very big street. Looks like we found the right post office! The Russian postal site even has photos of the post-office branches, so we've included the one for "our" post office above. It's Ставрополь 7 and there are more photos if you follow the link. The postal code is 355007.

So far we've sent post cards and a letter. The rate is 94 cents for a typical letter in case you are wondering.