No, we haven't heard anything more yet...still waiting. Just thought it would be cool to celebrate Valentine's Day with our baby in Kaliningrad. Neither one of us are big on the whole celebration of Valentine's Day, but we do go out to a movie or dinner or something to be together :)

I had not realized how many of our friends and family are checking this blog on a daily basis...until so many of you asked me why I wasn't keeping it up-to-date. I need to use this space as more of any outlet so that I don't go crazy...and yes, I am going crazy with all this waiting.

We are living our lives on "Russian Time"...that means that everything is sooo much slower, takes much longer and is much harder to understand :) We heard over a week ago that we would be hearing about our referral and travel the next week...well, it has now been 11 days and still no word back from our coordinator here in the states saying that she had heard from our Russian facilitator. I was going to call her on Friday, but I decided that it would just piss me off so, I decided to wait and call after the weekend. Well, it is after the weekend and I still have not called or emailed her. Why? Because I don't want to hear the same "no news" line...I WANT TO HEAR SOME NEWS!!!

It is so hard to explain because we go on as if we are living our lives and we are to an extent...but, there is that underlying anticipation of waiting that is so hard to deal with. This journey for us started out over 3 years ago with us trying to have a baby...natural didnt work, so we tried IUI & IVF to no avail. So, we did not even hesitate to expand our family through adoption...after much research, we decided on Russia and on an agency...

So started the adoption process of homestudies, fingerprinting, paperwork, apostilling, immigration forms, more paperwork and finally travelling to Kaliningrad for our first trip to personally deliver said paperwork. No visits to the orphanage on this trip, just a meeting with our facilitator, translator and the guy that could have stopped this journey in its tracks. But, he said okay and that we were on our way to becoming parents and so we travelled home.

Now, here it is 5 months later and we are still waiting...waiting to hear that we will truly become parents, that we will be travelling to meet our baby...that the time has come. And in that waiting period, horror stories of adoptive parents killing or abusing their adopted Russian children slow down the Russian government's decisions...

And, your heart is breaking back in the states...then, when you get word that a referral is on the horizon and you call your husband at work to tell him...your heart soars because he is so excited you can feel the electricity through the phone. He has been so calm and stoic through all of this, being the mind of reason, the one keeping you sane and grounded. He finally lets it all out and his excitement shows through...

Now if they would just call so we can make our flight arrangements and fly a half a world away and hold our baby for the first time...