I think we're going to Russia....

Well, it's been a couple crazy weeks in the Knight household...maybe make that a crazy month. August started off with Alexander's 4th birthday party, Paul's mom was visiting from California and stayed with us for a while, we had work done on our house to accomodate a future family member and we went to Storyland for a long weekend.

But what really sent our month into overdrive was the news we received on Aug 15th. If you've read other posts on the blog (all of 3 LOL!!) you'll know that we had originally requested a girl and then decided to open our request to either gender for a number of reasons. We needed to update some paperwork to do this. We submitted the updated paperwork the beginning of August and our agency told us we may be registered by August 15th or August 22nd. Once we were registered then we may hear about an invitation to travel a few weeks later with potential for actually traveling a couple weeks later.

Late afternoon on the 15th I sent an email to our coordinator just noting that since we hadn't heard from her that we'd look forward to hearing how things went on the 22nd. Well she called about 10 minutes later saying that not only were we registered but that we were invited to travel the week of Sept 6-13!! That was just 3 weeks away - eeeek!!! It was a hilariously different experience than when we got "the call" for Alexander - before we both got on the phone, we're on cloud nine the whole night, went out for dinner, etc. This time, while I'm on the phone Paul is trying to keep Alexander from "mama'ing" me to death which didn't work and resulted in Alexander having a tantrum in the yard LOL. Then we went in the house to make dinner and do our usual evening routine... Over that weekend we made flight reservations as well as secured an apartment in Moscow and started the application for our visas. We were excited but a little overwhelmed as there was a lot to do.

So that was the "up" of the roller coaster...Friday the 22nd brought the "down". Alexander and I went to join Paul at EBSCO for lunch and afterwards went for an ice cream. As A and I were walking back to the car, our coordinator called. The agency rep in Moscow had had a meeting with the MOE earlier that day and there was some potential bad news for us. More and more Russian families were adopting/fostering kids and this had previously had just affected the availability of girls but now was affecting the availability of boys as well. Of course, this is a good thing for the kids to be able to stay in their birth country but not exactly the news we had wanted to hear. Anyway the MOE noted that there may not be kids available for adoption the week we are scheduled to be there. A family that was due to leave the following day was advised not to travel. Pretty devastating news. Exact details would be forthcoming the following Monday once the agency rep sat down with the MOE again and went through in detail the available children in the database.

So, needless to say it was a bummer of a weekend...worrying if we were actually going to travel and if not, what would our options be in the future as we wouldn't want to go through this uncertainty each time we might be invited to travel. We were also worried about the money we had just spent on airline tickets, apartment reservations and visas. Uggh.

Monday came and the trip was still on but things would not be really clear until Friday the 29th. Somewhat typical and we remembered this process of waiting to hear news only to be postponed to another day when we adopted Alexander. Friday (29th) brought the news that indeed we were still on and there should be children available for adoption when we go to the MOE on Sept 8th. So that is where we are now as I write this Tues, Sept 2nd. Hopefully we don't get a call from our agency this Friday saying its all off but I'm starting to feel like this might happen...oops better start packing :)

We will definitely keep you all posted and will write as much as we can from Russia - check here for updates!