If you’ve been keeping up with our time, you realize that as of Monday (Russian Christmas, nonetheless), we’ve been home for 5 months. I am continually in awe of how quickly time passes. Before we brought Iliya home, I always read others’ blogs, and just never thought I would ever get to the place where I would say time passes TOO quickly. It just seemed so far away.

But somehow, amazingly, we are to that point. And time keeps flying.

But we are having fun, as you will see in the video at the end of this post.

Today, we had our first post placement visit. When parents adopt a child from Russia, they make a commitment to the Russian government. This commitment is in the form of agreeing to have post-placement reports (PPR) conducted and sent to Russia. Basically, the Russians want to make sure that the children adopted internationally from their country are being taken care of. These reports must be done at 6, 12, 24, & 36 months post-adoption. I’m way oversimplifying, here, but I would say that a PPR visit is a sort of mini-homestudy experience.

A social worker comes out, asks questions about your transition – asks questions about the child, to see how he/she is growing and adjusting – and then is on her way.

This was pretty much what happened for us. A social worker from our homestudy agency came out and spent a little more than an hour with us. We talked about our pre-parenthood expectations…and how parenthood had actually matched up to those expectations. She asked about Iliya’s adjustment – sleeping, eating, attachment, etc. and about his health – sicknesses, height, weight, etc. She had to make note of what Iliya was wearing. Expected…but still interesting.

The plan is for us to have the report in-hand by Monday, so I can take it to be apostilled while I’m in Montgomery for work. Then, I’ll add about 10 pictures & send everything to our adoption agency so it can be forwarded on to Russia.

As I said, I had always dreamed of being able to say that we were doing our first PPR. It’s amazing that the time has finally come around. I’m not quite dreaming of the time to do our second one, because I want the time to slow down a little bit. My baby is growing into a boy, who will soon be a big boy, and I’m just not quite ready for that.

To beat away my blues, I made a little video. I’m in the process of transferring our current video tapes to DVD. And the first one that I transferred was the tape that was already in the camera. So it’s the most recent (if you couldn’t figure that out)…and I thought I would compile & share a few fun times with you. As usual…PLEASE ignore the intonation/accent of my voice. I can’t stand it. But it’s necessary to include, I suppose, so you’ll know what’s going on in some areas of the video.

So in lieu of any more writing on this fine evening, I’ll leave you with a small, recent collection of “Fun Times.”



((as well as a LINK (click here) because I can't get the durn thing to work. But I'm trying! -- GOT IT! I'm so proud - I figured it out! But there's the link, nonetheless))