Episode Recap #1

As you now know, we had to miss a few episodes of The Amazing Race because of our time in Russia. But, luckily, there are episode recaps posted on the CBS websites so I am all caught up on the latest happenings.
And, in the spirit of being able to catch up on what went on with our adoption, I will be posting some recaps of our trip to Russia and our process for all of you.
We did have the ten day waiting period waived but, apparently, it still takes ten days for everything to be all legal. So, because I am a very cautious person, it'll be a few more days before I will post some pictures.
But here's how our first day went:

We left Boston on the 24th of March and flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt. We arrived in Frankfurt early on the 25th and proceeded to the gate to wait for our flight to Moscow. Since we had some time, we decided to watch a DVD on the laptop. And, 5 minutes into the DVD, the laptop crashed. We neglected to bring the windows recovery cd so things were not looking good for having a laptop for the trip. This was a bit discouraging because we had lots of DVDs to watch in the event of having to wait out the ten days. I was also hoping to email and post on the blog more often during the trip. Needless to say, a glitch. Not a big one but still a glitch.
About an hour into our flight to Moscow, the pilot made an announcement that there were some problems and they were taking us to Berlin to check out the plane. Well, I don't like flying so this made me nervous. On top of that, we were expected in Moscow soon and were meeting up with our friends from trip 1 to have dinner and take the overnight train to our region. We were still hopeful that we could make the overnight train at this point.
We were wrong! When we arrived in Berlin, they deplaned us and had us pick up our luggage. We placed our phone calls and said we would be late to Moscow. Then, we had to get on a flight from Berlin back to Frankfurt as there were no direct flights available to Moscow. We arrived back in Frankfurt, collected our luggage once again, and proceeded to book a flight to Moscow. Lufthansa wanted us to wait until the next day but, after pleading our case, they booked us on an Aeroflot flight leaving that night--due to arrive in Moscow at midnight. So, no overnight train. We figured we would have to take one the next night.
We did make it to Moscow at midnight and our facilitator drove us to the Sheraton Palace where we checked in for a few short hours as we had to be up by 6 30 am to catch a day train to our region. We thought we had it hard but our poor facilitator slept in his car outside the hotel as there was not enough time for him to return to his home and come back to get us so early in the morning. What a guy!
So, that's a recap of Day One!

As far as how things are going at home with Baby D---well we couldn't be happier. I wrote an email to my brother and described our new life as Chaos and Bliss! We're a lot busier with our new little one getting used to his new life. But, we are just too happy to notice!

BTW, we have decided on a blog name for Baby D---it will be Monchichi. I'm not sure if any of you remember that Monchichi dolls of the 70s/80s---but maybe you remember the song:

Monchichi, Monchichi, oh so soft and cuddly!

That's our little boy!