We received more information about our son yesterday. He is a healthy boy of 11 months...he has blond hair and blue eyes and is so adorable. Our son's given Russian name is Roman. We have decided to keep Roman as his name to keep his Russian heritage :)

We bought our plane tickets on Monday...we fly out on March 11th and will be back in the states on March 18th. We will get to see our son in just 19 days!! I can't believe it!!

Here is a map and some information on Kaliningrad because most people don't know much if anything about the region. My Mother-in-Law and I went there in August for the first trip to hand-deliver our paperwork.

Russia's smallest oblast (region) of Kaliningrad is an exclave located 200 miles away from the border of Russia proper. Kaliningrad was a spoil of World War II, allocated from Germany to the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference that divided Europe between the allied powers in 1945. The oblast is a wedge-shaped piece of land along the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, approximately one-half the size of Belgium, 5,830 mi2 (15,100 km2). The oblast's primary and port city is also known as Kaliningrad.

Known as Konigsberg prior to Soviet occupation, the region was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after Mikhail Kalinin, formal "leader" of the Soviet Union from 1919 until 1946. At the time, Germans living in the oblast were forced out, to be replaced with Soviet citizens. While there were early proposals to change the name of Kaliningrad back to Konigsberg, none were successful.

Approximately 400,000 people live in metropolitan Kaliningrad and a total of nearly one million are in the oblast, which is approximately one-fifth forested.