Saturday 3/22

We had a busy day with adoption stuff! This is good news to me because we are spending a lot of time waiting on appointments or documents to be processed. Today I felt like we took a big step forward! Unfortunately it rained all day! We had to walk to get to where we needed to go. The White Swan provided us with umbrellas, but we still ended up soaked.

The first thing we did was go get Sydney’s visa photo taken. We walked about a half a block to the photo place. She promptly sat up on the stool, growled at the photographer, got her picture taken, and we walked back in the rain. Thank you very much!

Next we had to do some paperwork. I went to do the paperwork while Wayne stayed and gave Miss. Growling Child a nap! Most of our forms that we had filled out before we got here were all on expired forms. Everyone had expired versions of the forms. We have no idea why. We all got them from Holt. So we had to redo a bunch of them. Basically it was the same forms, just updated versions.

Our next water adventure was Sydney’s medical exam. All babies must pass a medical check in order to be adopted. It was about a 5 block walk in the rain. Sydney loved it. She kept reaching her hand out from under the umbrella to feel the rain. I however did my best to keep her dry. The medical exam was chaotic and primitive at best. The hearing exam consisted of playing a toy piano on one side of her. She turned to look at it and they rang a rattle on the other side. She turned toward the rattle. Hearing is good! The doctors had a hard time understanding us and we had to go get our guides to translate for us. The most effective thing about it was her measurements. She weighed17.1 lbs and was 28 inches tall. So tiny. I was relieved when it was over.

The rest of the day was free. We spent some time at Starbucks unwinding and then walked around a while. Wayne cannot stand to just sit in the hotel room so we have walked around the neighborhood several times. Here’s your Sydney fix for the day: