Day 2 waiting - The infirmary (double click for pics)

Friday, July 21--- (Day 2 waiting period)

Well, Mommy and the baby are both doing well after the “re-birth” of Landen. It has been a long “pregnancy of sorts” for us, but yesterday made every minute worth it. We would like to thank our family and friends for all there support along the way. Kim is doing amazingly well and is back on her feet getting around just fine. Landen, as you can see, is also doing very well and is already crawling around. Wow, who would have thought this could happen so fast…..

On a side note before we talk about the day, we are putting together a cd to capture the journey and would like to ask all of you to help us by giving us some ideas for songs that can be played in the back ground during the showing. You can email Kim or add it to the blog. We know there are some songs about adoption out there, or songs that would be very fitting…but cannot think of them. Thanks in advance.

Today will be call infirmary for a very good reason:

First, at 12 am our time our doctor, Dr. Plotkin, called us unexpectedly to check up on Landen. We had emailed a photo of his ear to him and had discussed the situation around treatment in the baby house with him and he has been wonderful throughout this. Dr. Plotkin is also Russian and has offered to call the baby house Dr. directly if needed. He has also said the medical will be in Russian and he will translate them for us. What a wonderful person he is and we appreciate what he is doing for our family, so very far away. There are not many doctors out there that would care as much as he does!!! Thank you Dr. Plotkin!

After another simple morning (grits for breakfast), we arrived at 12:00pm for our visit. Kim again went upstairs to get our son, but to our surprise he was not in the room. Kim attempted to communicate with the caretakers and somehow made out that he was getting treatment for his ear. He had been moved from his group to the infirmary or on-site baby hospital. This was alarming, but after we saw him we were glad to see he was being treated for his ear. They had to feed him (takes 3 minutes or so), then he was brought to the room for some play time. His complexion was a little pale, but his ear was showing signs of improvement. Later we found out from our attorney that he is on an antibiotic and confirmed he was doing much better. If he continues to show the same improvement over the next few days, he will rejoin his group on Monday.

The play time was a little mellow for the first half of the time since we did not want to get him too worked up. He of coursed hugged and loved on Mommy (sorry Barbara, no warning) and you could see in his eyes that he missed her yesterday. As he got out the “lovey dovey” on Mom, it was time for Rylee and Dad to get some attention. Rylee did a wonderful job of keeping him on the sheets when he was crawling. Just to note: we have be scolded when a caretaker saw him crawling off of the sheet in the past, a big no, no. Dad played the sunglass game with him. He loves to take my sunglasses off of my head or face and bang them on what ever he can. Yes, when he gets excited he will bang a toy or paci around a little bit. ANGER MGMT? J
The visit ended way too soon again, as we were enjoying every minute with our son! We took him back to the infirmary where we pray his health will continue to improve.

After the visit, we had an appointment with our attorney. We started planning our “gotcha” day and our return to the states. Some good and some bad came from the meeting. I would like to add that before we went to the meeting, Kim and I were discussing that we needed to take some money for the passport and visa in order to get home and may need to pay something to get Landen home sooner (not sure what if anything we could do, but we were going to be prepared. Rylee heard this conversation and went to her money and pulled out a thousand tenge (1/3 of her cash) and told us that she wanted to give this money to us for us to use in getting Landen home sooner. This was a very sweet and heart warming moment! Unfortunately, we did not have a lot of opportunity to move the process along any faster.

We spent 1 hour discussing when we could pick up Landen, when we could travel to Almaty and when we could travel home. At first, it appeared we would not be picking up Landen until 8/5 or possibly 8/7 and would not be traveling home until 8/17 or later. We explained our need to get back to work, get Rylee in school and have Landen back where we can get him treated for his conditions. Our attorney and translator started looking at dates and process steps to see where they could save us some time. Not a lot of time to save as we are dealing with a couple of weekends (same as US, everything stops except for Progressive!) and a foreign country’s speed to process. We did get some of the dates to share with everyone:

8/4 - “Gotcha” day. We will have a little party at the baby house and pick up or son for good.

8/10 - We will travel to Almaty.

8/11 - We will have the medical exam for Landen in Almaty

8/15 - Landen’s visa and passport should be ready and we start our flight home after 4pm. We will update the arrival time in Atlanta as soon as we confirm it.

A priority note: Pitts - we need to get the fantasy football mock draft set up and Kim is ready to assist J. We do need to have the draft around 8/26 if possible, see what you can do. Udaman!

We ended the day with several phone calls and it was great to hear from everyone. We have an incredible support team behind us!!!!!!! I will use the phone calls as an excuse for not posting on time, really I was being lazy! (FYI---we have been talking to people on Skype…this is through our computer, and it is costing us 2 cents per minute! It has been such a blessing to be able to talk to our family ½ way around the world and it not costs us an arm and a leg!) Also, we have been asked a couple times if we are able to keep up with world news. We have a couple English channels on our tv….one is a European CNN channel(which is not very Bush friendly), a foreign variance of VH1(which actually plays really good American music), and Euronews. I have found a couple of Russian sports channels---I have gotten to watch soccer, track and field, gymnastics and some sporting events that we don’t know the name for….I am missing the Braves, the British Open and Sports Center! Needless to say I am in sports withdrawal! It is all worth it, though!

Until day 3 waiting…..poka, poka