Made it to Moscow

Friends & Family:

Well, the good news is we made it to the other side of the globe with only minor difficulties. The flight we had booked from San Francisco (via Amsterdam) was delayed by two hours, which meant that we would have missed our connecting flight to Moscow. We eventually transferred to an AirFrance flight connecting through Paris and with a bit of airport endurance racing, we made both flights — San Francisco and Paris.

Moscow is an amazingly large and mysterious city (9 times larger than San Francisco in size and 14 times larger in population, or for a different perspective, just a bit smaller than all of Los Angeles but more than 2.7 times the number of residents!) Even with a semester of Russian under my belt, the language is very challenging and the Cyrillic alphabet alien. While I can (with some difficulty) pronounce the words I see, I have no clue what I'm saying.

Fortunately for us, part of the deal with our adoption agency was to provide us not only with a driver (Vladimir), but also a translator (Masha) — at least for the official visits of orphanage visits and appointments with the Moscow bureaucrats. Many of the natives here speak English, and those who don't seem to be able to get whatever Renee or I are asking for in our mangled Russian phrases.

Because Moscow is 11 hours ahead of the west coast, jet lag has thrown us for a lingering loop. We were up for about 26 hours (scattered napping) when we finally made it to bed Wednesday night and had to be up at 6:30 for an 8:30 appointment at the orphanage on the far side of town. (Traffic here is worse than anywhere I've seen — the city has just a handful of main boulevards that act as expressways through and around town, but major construction is going on simultaneously and without apparent coordination.)

Now for the good stuff.....

So we arrived at the orphanage early this morning and were greeted by the orphanage director. We were asked to wait in the "special meeting room" (the auditorium — about the size of a large conference room), while they dressed the little one for our first meeting. Prior to traveling, we had only been told that she was under the age of two and that she was brunette. On the drive over, we learned that her birthdate was August 1, 2006, making her nearly 14 months old. Other than that, we were clueless. When they brought her in, dressed in her teal dress and with her dark hair poking out in all directions, we both fell in love with her.

Her name is (take a deep breath for this one!): Syevinch Rakhminova Musurmonova. We will most likely incorporate her given name into her Americanized once she is legally ours. She was given to the state at the age of one month by an unwed mother of reportedly Russian/Uzbeki heritage. She has no identifiable extended relatives and no siblings according to the initial report. We hired a doctor to come in while we were there (a common practice for adopting parents to ensure no serious medical issues), who said that she appeared to be in reasonably good health. And while her development is mildly delayed (due to the simple reality of having been institutionalized for nearly her entire life), she is expected to get back on track once brought home.

Upon introducing us to her, the orphanage staff pretty much left us alone with her for the next 45 minutes. Because she had no experience of men, my two minutes of holding her was a test of her lung capacity as she cried unconsolably. Renee had much better luck with her and began the long, arduous task of bonding. We will return again Friday morning for another 90-minute visit and hope to be able to return again over the weekend before having to initiate the paperwork process.

We are certain that Syevinch is the girl for us, so please keep us in your thoughts in the hope of a quick and successful process from this point forward. I will write more as we have additional updates and photos.

With love,
Larry & Renee