Perfect Strangers

What a day! Today was the first visiting day at the baby house! Our visiting hours are from Noon until 2:00 p.m. each day. We arrived at noon and she had just woken up. She was getting a fresh diaper and a cute little outfit - pink of course! When the caregiver went to put on her cute little red shoes, she kept moving her foot around and basically refusing her shoe. The caregiver put it away and pulled out precious orange, hand-made slipper socks. When the caregiver held it up for her to see if these were acceptable footwear, the baby grabbed it and snuggled it like a blanket or something! It was cute. These were acceptable to her to be placed on her feet. I'm glad to see she likes her footwear, shoes have always been a favorite of mine too!

It was time for me to hold her now! The caregiver passed her off, which was fine for about 5 seconds and then she began to cry. The caregiver took her back and we went and all sat down together for a few minutes. (She cried a total of maybe 10 seconds.) Now it was time for us to go in the other play room so we could play with her - and she was ready to go! In fact, she was now holding on to me for dear life. It was awesome!

They decided it would be too much for her to have the full two hours today, so our visit was only 1 hour long. It was hard to leave, but I was so happy to have had that hour, FINALLY! After maybe 15 minutes, she released her death grip of me, and got off my lap and starting playing with some toys that were there as well as some I brought. I'll tell you, when she likes something, she isn't letting it go - and you'd better not take it from her! :) She's smart as a whip and knows exactly where you are 'hiding' something. She doesn't like it when she can't find it. :) There is a mirror in the room and she quite enjoyed looking at herself in it! She crawled over to the mirror and pulled herself up on it. She was quite proud of herself, as was I!

Her grin is charming and her laugh is contagious!

The hour went by very fast, but I was just so grateful to have had that time and to have had it go so well. When it was time for me to give her back to her other caregiver, she didn't want to at first! But, then when I passed her off, she was fine - so that was good. No more tears! As the title suggests, I believe we are Perfect Strangers, (Perfect for each other, and yet total strangers) but oh what a difference a few days and weeks is going to make! I am not going to post pictures at this time, but I'll give you a small glipse of the precious little baby who is stealing my heart!

Sneak peek for today:

In other news of the day... we switched apartments today. It was late afternoon before we moved in - but we are now here and relaxing quite nicely. There is even a dvd player, so while I am blogging, Mom is watching a DVD she brought on a nice (large) tv in the apartment. Since the tv is in Russian, dvd's are all we've got and we had been watching them on the laptop which was fine, but this is better!

This apartment is considerably larger. I think the main difference is that there are two bedrooms - one with two twin beds and one with a queen bed. The kitchen and bathroom are both larger as well. There is a washing machine in this apartment - yeah! (Although you should see the size of this washer... it won't hold much at one time, that's for sure!) Time for some clean laundry! One funny thing is that there is a chandelier in the living room and it shakes when people upstairs walk/run/jump or whatever it is that they are doing. It sounds more like there is an earthquake, and so far it's charming, but I think that may get a little old. I hope the people upstairs calm down a little! :) Also, the clock in the living room is LOUD, but luckily we won't be sleeping out here in this apartment, so it shouldn't be a big deal. If it is, we'll take the battery out and use something else as a clock. Someone keeps ringing our doorbell too, I do hope that doesn't continue - especially when we're sleeping. That might drive me crazy. We're told not to answer the doors, so I'm not. But, I did walk up to it the last time, and said, in English, Hello? Hello? No one answered and so far they haven't returned, so we shall see!

I did get to send a picture of the baby home for dad and Matthew to see, as well as Bobby and Regan. Therefore, we chatted with Dad and Matthew again as they were waking up. They were excited to get a picture (since I finally figured out how to get one to send via dial-up after a frustrating evening last night where I spent an hour or more and nothing would send!) I'm not sure exactly when we will get to chat with them again - but it was wonderful, of course, to get to share a picture from our first visit with them, so even though we are half a world apart, we are sharing as much as we can with them during this experience.

Thank you all for your prayers, and comments and emails! We are apreciative of all of them! Keep it up. Hopefully now we'll get in to a routine and since we are in our 'final' apartment, we should be pretty settled going forward.