Three days till our court decree is finalized….

A continuing story…we are literally loosing track of what day of the week it is. Now that we have confirmed it to be Friday, we are just a few short days away from officially finalizing our adoption of Victoria. April is nearing and we will soon be on our way to Moscow.

Victoria is getting used to our daily schedule and is full of energy. The Vlad Inn is a family/kid friendly location. So, this has been a great place to spend our first days as a family. We’ll have to see how Victoria reacts to next week’s plane ride (8 hours) and the new set up/schedule in Moscow. We are looking forward to seeing a number of Moscow’s historic landmarks (Red Square, St. Basil’s and even the Moscow Zoo). Victoria seems to really enjoy animals (in books and on the National Geographic channel). So, the zoo should be a hit.

We have been trying to see how many English words we can teach Victoria. Since she is fluent in Russian, it is a little more difficult. She has been picking up on things, though. She is learning to count in English (she is already able to count in Russian). We have been working on counting the number of stairs for starters. So far, she has 1, 2 and 3. We’ll see how things go…

We decided to take Victoria for a walk today down toward the Sea. The breeze made it quite cold, so we were going to call off the trip a little short. On the way back, we ran into our friends Chris, Daniela and Sasha. So, we decided to take a trip to the little market located near the hotel (think of a small 7-11). This, of course, turned out to be Victoria’s first ever trip to the store. We were little anxious to see how she would react, but we felt that this would be a good place to start (rather than a full sized store). She handled it like a champ and was very calm.

In the store, there is a nice older woman that we have heard about. Folks call it the “Babushka Test” where the woman checks over the kids to ensure that the new parents have dressed them appropriately. The woman (who is very nice and we have seen in the store a number of times) had a nice little conversation with Victoria and told her that she was “kraseevee” (beautiful). We are proud to say that Victoria passed! Haha… This evening, Victoria interacted very nicely with a newly adopted 18 month old boy (when he dropped his ball, she picked it up and handed it to him on several occasions). Hopefully, this bodes well for her interacting with young cousins/friends.

Here are a few more pictures, this time some shots around the hotel. The first is a shot of the White Rabbit (where we and a number of adoptive parents spend a fair amount of their time). The second is a shot of Victoria’s bath toys, which she lines up very neatly after her bath (it was tough finding any bath toys here, especially girlie ones…but these were better than spaceships…haha). The third is our kitchen. The fourth is a shot of our living room.