Our last day in Astrakhan

Well, here we are in our hotel room on Friday, our last night here in Astrakhan. We just got back from dinner with Donnie and Rai-Lynn. We went to San Pizza again tonight. You really can’t go wrong there. The pizza is just like home and it’s pretty inexpensive. It’s about 9:30 PM here, and according to the clock on the computer, which we never changed to “Moscow time”, it’s 1:30 PM back in Michigan. Russ and Monica flew off safely to Moscow this morning. Their plane left very early this morning. Ours is at the same time tomorrow, so we’ll need to be up at about 4:30 to get ready to go to the airport on time. It’s okay, it’s not like we sleep that much anyway here. We’re really looking forward to being home again.

But of course, there’s a problem with that too. We got to see our little girl twice today, for about an hour each time. The second time was very emotional as we knew that we wouldn’t see her again for at least six weeks or so. Will she remember us when we come back to get her? Everyone says yes, but with her being so young, we’re just not sure. She had more mosquito bites today, and her rashes seemed to be acting up more. It appears she has Kyley’s skin, if that’s at all possible. But she seemed very happy anyway, probably the happiest we’ve seen her so far. There was no crying and she had lots of smiles for us as we played with her, more than any other visit. We managed to capture a couple of them with the camera this time, too. We do know that she’ll still be happy while we’re gone because she has an obvious bond with her caregivers there. Her eyes light up when she sees them, so we know she gets lots of attention and is loved. We just can’t wait until that’s our job to do full time. It seems like an eternity right now, but I’m sure time will fly by as we go back to our normal routines and start the task of getting things ready for her arrival in September or October. Let’s just say September. PLEASE!

We’ll be in Moscow again for one night and we now know that we can get free Internet access at McDonalds there. Which is great because the hotel charges extra for it and McD’s is right across the street. We’re a little worried about what the Internet charge will be here at the Korvet Hotel in Astrakhan. They keep track of how many megabytes we send and receive, and charge us by that. It’s 5 rubles (about 22 cents) per megabyte I think. We really have no idea how much we’ve sent and received, but for those of you frustrated by the lack of pictures on our blog and in our emails, that would be the reason. When we get home, we’ll post more, though we are still not allowed to post pictures of her online until the adoption is completely final.

So long from Astrakhan! Honey, we’ll be back just as soon as we can! Next post will be from Moscow again so stay tuned.

Mom and Dad, we’ll try to call you from Moscow, since our calling card should work there.