Day Six: Seeing Ivan!

Ok, we didn't post anything over the weekend. But besides hanging out with our great new friends here, all we did was shopping, going to church on Sunday, and watching a movie or two while relaxing. Nothing happened that brought us closer to bringing Ivan home, so forgive us for not bringing forth all of the details.

Monday morning we find out at 9:40am that we are leaving at 11am to go to the town where Ivan currently lives (a 4 hour drive from our hotel). We arrive there at about 3pm and make a stop at the city inspector's office to give and receive updates on a number of things about Ivan. We learn a few things about Ivan's birth family (that are too personal to share in a place like this), and more or less it is all good news for us. This visit lasted about 15 minutes, and we move on to the orphanage.

We arrive and go directly to the Chief Doctor's office (she's the one who runs the orphanage...it's technically a baby hospital, hence the Chief Doctor). We hang up our coats and walk in, and what do we see?

Someone was waiting for us! Still pretty shy though, so he didn't exactly throw himself into our arms. Very cautious with us strangers, and a little more interested in figuring out this new toy that was in the doctor's office than he was in meeting new people. We move on to the "visiting room," for lack of an official name.

We don't have many toys with us, and we learn that there really aren't any toys here that he hasn't seen already, so there's not much to get him excited about.

...and I can't get this picture to rotate no matter what I do.

This is definately our little boy that we've been waiting for all this time! He eats an apple, and a little dry cereal. Actually he loved the cereal, and ate all that there was of it! We try to introduce him to the "Barrel of Monkeys," but he didn't seem interested in that either.


He did seem quite interested in the coloring book we brought though. Seemed like a good sign for the crafty/artsy parents that he has! :-) He colored for a bit with mom...






...finished off the cereal...
(I know, I still can't rotate the picture. I don't like working on a Mac!!!)






...and then did some more coloring with daddy! We only had about a half an hour to be with him, and then he had to go off and eat his supper. Perhaps we spoiled it for him with all of the food that we gave him? Who knows?





And that was the end of our time with him. When it was time for him to go, he made sure to take the coloring book with him, which was very fun for us to see! We got a few more updates from the Chief Doctor (medical updates specifically) and headed home at around 5:30. We got back to our hotel at 9:30, and that was it.

We believe that we will be able to see him again on Friday. Tomorrow we are going to change hotels, as we found one that is much, much cheaper than the one we currently are at! Otherwise, we really don't know what we have to do tomorrow. Keep praying that our INS/USCIS paperwork comes through, and that all of our documents that we had shipped DHL arrive quickly and safely.