First Contact

After breakfast at the hotel buffet, we were able to visit the orphanage for around 90 minutes this morning. It was an “informal” meeting (i.e. not officially scheduled… official meetings are during the week). The kids all were able to meet each other and despite their different languages, they were able to play together very well. You don’t need much language for soccer, Lego’s, and a playground. Both of the Russian kids seem to be happy and at least as healthy as when we left them in July. Gennadiy has a new, short-cropped haircut and is still very shy unless Yana is also there. They didn’t know we would be coming to visit them today, but when they both saw us they gave a huge smile and came running as fast as they could.

We were a little concerned about how Yana would respond. She was a little reserved around us back in July. She was very obviously excited about us coming and it was also clear that she’s been thinking about the adoption a lot. She gave more and better smiles than we have ever seen from her. She wanted to know if she could come home with us this trip. We told her that we weren’t leaving without her and she gave a huge, contented smile. She also told us that they did get the letters we’ve been sending and pointed out that they were in both Russian and English. She’s ready. I wish we could post a photo for everyone, but we can’t do that quite yet… but we will be able to do so soon.

We have an interview with a social worker and the kids in the morning at the orphanage. Then, after lunch, we have the first of two days of court. This is the day where they will grill us on our homestudy and other documents as well as why we are adopting from Russia. This is the hard day. Tuesday will be more formal, but less stressful in terms of questioning.


We had a nice time walking around Stavropol this afternoon, even though it was cool (4 deg. C) and misting a light rain. We then had dinner at “Fresh Burger”… in the food court in the Galleria mall by the hotel. Fresh Burger will now forever be our new codeword for eating really, really bad fast food. We struggled trying to order because I couldn’t find the menu items in our dictionary… and then it dawned on me that they were phonetic spellings in Russian of English Words that we already knew. The kids had chicken nuggets (Наггец), which were halfway edible. Lisa and I each had a burger (Бургер), which was not. By the way, “ketchup” cost extra and it was actually more like a cross between cocktail sauce and salsa. We won’t be paying extra for it next time. They must also REALLY like mayonnaise here based on the amount smeared on the burger… except it was more like a cross between sour cream, mayonnaise, and butter. Yum. Overall, it was an interesting experience in trying to order from the counter in a language you don’t really speak (it’s harder than using a menu where you can just point when they can’t understand you).