Cutting it close....

Hello from Almaty. The next 18 hours or so are going to be very interesting, so we need your best thoughts over here!

Galina reports that our paperwork was approved in Astana, the Kazakhstan capitol, at 4 p.m. today (Thursday). All that remains is that the papers make it back to Almaty tomorrow morning. And that’s not so easy. The plane with our papers is supposed to arrive at 11 a.m. tomorrow in Almaty. Galina then has until noon to get it to the US Embassy so they may review it for Drew’s 2 p.m. appointment. No papers, no appointment.

And if we miss Friday’s appointment, we won’t get to the Embassy until Monday, which means we won’t get home until Tuesday. Ugh! I hate uncertainties! Galina says we should have no problems IF the plane is on time. That’s a big if, so that’s why we need some good thoughts.

That’s all the adoption news today – Drew and I pretty much spent the day playing and staying warm. Remember I told you that the heat wasn’t working in our room and they brought in a space heater? Well, the side benefit to that is that our room is the warmest place in the hotel. Great for little boys to play and sleep, but it’s a little claustrophobic to be in the same room all day, every day. Drew and I went out to the lounge area on our hotel’s floor today just for a change of pace, but it was a little cold to stay for long.

One kind of sad thing is that Drew could hear a baby crying in the distance and he started calling for it (he makes loud, purposeful grunts when he wants something or your attention, the rest of the time he babbles). I don’t know if he was calling the baby, or calling what he thought were his caregivers from the orphanage. I hope it wasn’t the latter, but I’ll never know and can never imagine what he’s gone though this week.

Our only other outing today was to the pharmacy about a block away, which is the best place around here to buy baby supplies. We got a new stack of diapers that should get us through our trip on Sunday, and I stopped at the bank to change enough dollars into the local currency to pay for our hotel stay.

Drew’s being very independent today – refusing to drink out of the sippy cup unless I take off the lid so he can drink like a big kid, and trying to walk around the entire room rather than doing his crawl. Of course, he fell a couple of times on the hardwood floor, and I think he’s got a fresh bump on his head. Poor little boy!

I hope that the weather back home isn’t too bad today and tomorrow – Beth says New Britain is expected to get up to 6 inches of snow, and then a storm over the weekend. Shoveling the snow is my job at the house and I hope Beth doesn’t have too bad a time of it. I’ll worry more about the Sunday weather after I find out if we make our embassy appointment.

That’s all for now – Drew and I are having supper downstairs, and then I’m going to try to keep him up until 9, hoping that he sleeps longer tomorrow. :)