All Went Well!

Our SDA appointment went very well. Thanks for praying! We received a bit of information about Elijah...his family, medical, etc. We were shown a couple of younger photos of him, and were able to swap one for one of them. (We brought a recent photo of him and they gave us one of the baby photos.) Very cute! :-) They just asked us a bit about our family and if we had any other children with special needs. Pretty easy stuff! We will receive our official referral tomorrow afternoon between 4 & 5pm. I have to admit that I had some mixed emotions there. While I'm very happy to be adding Elijah to our family, I felt a tremendous sadness for his family that gave him up. Do they think about him? Wonder about him? Miss him? My mommy's heart wants to say yes.  Or were they able to just move on and close the door on their hearts?  I don't know, and I guess I never will know and that's ok.

Niko picked us up this morning bright and early and the Swerdfeger family was already in the car. Their appt was at 9am, ours at 10am. Have I told you how small the cars are here? And no seatbelts, but I guess if 5 adults are in one car, you can't go far anyway. LOL It was fun to be able to chat with them on the way as we watched Niko navigate the city streets during rush hour.

We met Serge, one of the facilitators, at the SDA building. While we waited for the Swerdfegers to finish their appt., we went to a little Italian restaurant down the hill a bit for breakfast. We had omelets and freshly squeezed juice. Yum!  We didn't get a chance to do any shopping, but hopefully we will be able to shop a bit before picking up our referral paperwork tomorrow afternoon. We were actually done before 10AM. We would have been back to the restaurant in about 10 min, but Serge has lots of friends there and was chatting for a while.

So, here's the tentative schedule:

Wed afternoon: Pick up referral paperwork
Wed night: Catch overnight train to Elijah's city
Thursday: Arrive in Elijah's city and hopefully go to the orphanage to meet him and get started on the paperwork to get our court date

Have I told you how surreal this all still seems to me? I was telling Pat on the plane ride over here that it felt a little like the car ride to the hospital when I was in labor. :-)  (Thankfully, my labors were not as long as the plane ride!) Even though we are here and can only pick out "da" (yes) and "spaciba" (thank you) out of any conversation, it still doesn't seem real. Strange, huh?  Well, I know as soon as I lay eyes on our precious boy...then...it will be real and the floodgates will open!