Weds morning came early, as it had every day we were there. We found ourselves up watching movies we had brought with us at 230 am and Skyped home to chat with Little C at grandma's house. It was day 3, the last day we would get to visit Alexey before we headed home for a few months of paperwork. We skipped breakfast this day and opted for the granola bars we brought along with Starbucks Via brew and waited for the sun rise, we were leaving to go to the orphange a bit later this day because the children were having a small paget or play type event where Father Frost (Russian Santa) was making a visit. Unfortunately we could not attend, but wanted Alexey to be a part of it so we needed to make our morning visit short.
We we arrived, there was the same smell of stew cooking....this time it made my stomach churn, maybe it was due to the butcher block I saw outside the orphanage window the day before - it was a tree stump with BIG SLABS OF RAW MEAT AND BONES and a man with an AX! He literally was using the stump as a butcher block, with an ax that we would use to chop a tree down.He was chopping the meat into manage size portions, then another man grabbed them and threw them in a bucket and off they went. That moment took me back to my childhood, and my father filling buckets of horse food and carrying it to each pen...really this is how my child is fed? I could only assume it was for the stew I kept smelling which no longer warmed my heart but made me cringe!
Alexey was in the same clothes as yesterday afternoon, which didn't bother me because I new he had been in them less than 24 hours and I have no idea if that is what he sleeps in or if he is put into warmer PJ's at night. He was still clinging for dear life as his caregiver handed him over to me, but his tears only last about 10 seconds. He instantly perked up and wanted to play with our video camera that we had brought with us today. He opened and shut the little screen a thousand times and then would see us through the screen and kiss the screen with big ol' puckered lips. He didn't like to kiss us so much in person but loved to kiss the cameras where he could see us. We left a waterproof photo album with him yesterday. It had pictures of us and Little C in it, with one of the adoption photos we took last summer with the chalkboard saying "waiting for you".
Today was fun...Alexey was fun, he smiled, he played, he was a little defiant and was acting a bit more like a Two year old should. He was a different boy today..it was a relief! I didn't have the caution lights on so much today and I felt comfortable watching him play with Jeremy and knew that Little C and him would be the bestest of friends soon. Our morning visit was short but we knew were returning in a few hours to spend our final visit with him.
We went back to the hotel and grab a bit to eat at the coffee shop around the corner then decided we would walk 4 blocks in the freezing temperatures to get a few pictures of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was cold! -27 below and 10 mins of walking was about all we could tolerate..I talked Jeremy into a pit stop at the ice sculptures across the street from our hotel. He was not thrilled because he was sooo cold. When I looked at him, he literally had icicles hanging from his unshaven beard. I began laughing so hard at this that my eyes began to water and then I realized that was a mistake...my eyes froze open! So we opted for the hotel to warm up - remember this was all in less than 20 minutes!
We arrived back at Orphanage # 5 around 3pm. Alexey was still sleeping so we worked on our paperwork. We needed to sign some official documents stating that we wanted to proceed with the adoption. We didn't even think twice and signed away. So that was done. We knew this day was monumental, not just to us but because of the talk of the Russian/US adoption ban. The upper parliament was supposed to be meeting today in Moscow to pass the Ban onto President Putin. We were aware that this was the direction it was headed but everyone was hopeful that the Treaty in place protected families in the process for 1 year. We knew we needed our paperwork signed before the first of Jan. Alexey arrived this time with little resistance and took very little time adjusting to us and went right to playing airplane with daddy and of course the video camera was a hit again. We held him tight and spoke words of love into his heart, I know he didn't understand a single thing we told him, but hopefully he felt the love we had. It made me sad, to think that tomorrow would come and we would not show up to visit and he would wonder what he did wrong or why we didn't come back for him. We did promise him we would be back soon...
Our visit flew by and we had very little notice of his departure so we didn't have time to relish our good byes or cling to him for dear life...because trust me..........if I knew then what I know today - I would have held him longer, memorized his scent, gazed into his big brown eyes longer and prayed to GOD that we would be a family soon and asked our coordinator to tell him all these things in Russian so he would understand! But I didn't....so the caregiver came and got him, turned to take him away and asked him to wave and with a big smile he simply waved GOOD BYE.
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