Russia Trip 2

Hi everybody! We've already been home with Bennett over a month! I've been meaning to write about our second trip to Russia for quite awhile but we truly have been a little bit busy :). As a side note, some of my pictures and text were messed up after spell checking. I don't have time to figure out what happened so it will just have to stay that way for now.

We left Minnesota on February 22nd, 2010 - Bennett's first birthday. On our way to the airport Aaron got a message on his cell phone letting us know the our Minneapolis to JFK flight had been canceled! After working with a resourceful ticket agent, we were able to get a flight to La Guardia and take a cab to JFK to catch our flight to Moscow. We flew on the Russian airline, Aeroflot. The flight was over nine hours and we arrived in Moscow around 1:00 pm on Tuesday the 23rd. On Wed. morning we were driven to the domestic airport in Moscow and flew on an incredibly old airplane from the soviet era (an HU-134) to Orenburg. It was not a smooth ride but thankfully we made it. Our coordinator was there waiting for us. I was surprised when he said we would get to visit Bennett that evening after checking in at the hotel.



Here are some pictures of our home for 17 days.

After driving to the orphanage, we waited for them to bring Bennett for nearly an hour since it was still nap time for Bennett. Talk about suspense! But finally a caretake brough him in. He was as cute as ever, had a lot more hair, and two new teeth.

We were able to visit twice on Thursday. During the second visit, we prepped for court with our coordinator and interpretor.

Here Bennett is modeling one of the "boy" outfits he was occasionally dressed in.

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We had court Friday, Feb. 26th at 10:30 am. The judge asked us to state our demographic information, asked if we understood our obligations after court (we must provide 4 post placement reports to Russia over the next three years), and asked about our families. The prosecutor asked me if I was ready to take on the responsibility of caring for Bennett - I said I've been waiting a long time for this. I'm more than ready! Next, the social worker presented her information. Then the judge left the room to deliberate. When he came back in he said he would satisfy our application to adopt. Our ten day wait was not waived (and ended up being a 12 day wait due to our 10th day falling on a Russian holiday). The adoption was not official until the wait was over. So, we hung out at the hotel and watched a lot of movies that we brough along (thanks Nicole!), did a lot of reading (Aaron read the longest book of his life) and visited Bennett once a day.

Here we are in the court room. Almost Mama and Papa!

We went to play Russian billiards with our coordinator a few times. They call American pool a "child's game." The pockets are much smaller in Russian billiards.

Here are some more pictures of our time visiting with Bennett in the orphanage. You'll notice we had a countdown going :).

Aaron claims to dislike cats but sat for 20 minutes without moving his leg despite getting sore in order not to disturb the cat's snooze. This is the resident orphanage cat.

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This hat was held together with a rubberband on top.

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This is the day we went to pick Bennett up and start the journey home -March 10th, 2010.

We had an hour at the hotel before we needed to leave for our flight back to Moscow.

We needed to spend a couple of days in Moscow in order to get Bennett a Visa from the U.S. embassy so that he could enter America (he has a Russian passport). Our adoption agency took us around to do some sight seeing one day.

This St. Basils Cathedral.

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Lenin's Mosaleom in Red Square.

We left Moscow on Sat. March 13th and were supposed to fly Moscow to JFK to Minneapolis and get to Minneapolis on the 13th in the late evening. However, there were strong storms with 80 mph wind gusts in New York and after circling the airport the pilot decided to try to land. I am not exaggerating when I say that this was the most frightening experience of my life. We could feel our enourmous plane being tossed around - and because there was a camera in the nose of the plane showing the landing on our personal video monitors we could also see that we were being tossed to the left of the landing strip. That is when our pilot gunned it and we aborted the landing. Many, many people were vomiting through this experience. I was feeling a little bit light headed. However, this was one of the only times that Bennett actually slept :). We were diverted to Dulles airport. Bennett became a U.S. citizen as soon as the plane hit the ground. After waiting on the tarmac for well over an hour we were loaded onto a moving "lounge" (this is what they called it - it was not very lounge like,however) and driven to customs (we later found out that the pilot arranged this without permission.) After getting through customs, our plane of people discovered that the airline basically abandoned us. The crew went to a hotel to sleep and there was nobody else at the airport from the airline (this was the Russian airline, Aeroflot). Because there were no representitives from the airline, the airport was not allowed to unload our baggage. So we sat in baggage claim for four hours until people from a different airline helped us out. After getting our baggage we went to the Delta counter and they were able to get us on a 6:30 am flight to Minneapolis. So we spent the night in the airport with an overstimulated, overtired, unhappy baby :). Our little guy just wasn't able to sleep well - when he did sleep, it was for short little cat naps. Here he is playing on the airport floor in the middle of the night.

And finally, we made it to Minneapolis where are families were waiting to welcome us home. It was soooo good to see them!!!

We drove home, said "hi" to Floyd after being separated for a long 3 weeks, and eventually all crashed (Aaron and I had been up for almost 48 hours straight). The first couple weeks home were hard. We were working on getting over jet lag the first week. The second week Bennett got sick (had 105 fever) which sent us to the doctor a couple of times. He was not a happy camper. He is doing great now. He is growing (gained four pounds in 5 weeks!!) and learning new things all the time. It has been so fun to watch! I promise I will post some updated pictures soon!