The plans are set!

Well looks like everything is done except for the packing and the last minute stuff! We have our airline tickets (Thanks Jo, you are wonderful!!!!!), we have our hotels in Moscow and London, our coordinator takes care of the one in Murmansk along with the flight to the region, we have our ground transportation from the airport in Moscow to our hotel at the other airport. Visa application is to the agency, all the additional paperwork is almost done, so we should be able to bring it with us on trip 1. Thanks to Pop and Noni for the generous donation to our travel funds!!! We truly appreciate it. Arrangements for Alek are made (thanks LaLa, Jimmy, Grammom and Poppy), we keep telling Alek he will go on vacation soon to LaLa's house and get to sleep in Jakey's room--he said, "no Jakey's bed", "that fun". So hopefully that week will go smoothly and we won't be scaring off the babysitters for trip 2!

Thanks to everyone who has helped us out with paperwork, support, cheerleading and finding needed resources like CPA's and psychologists (thanks Tim and Rach!!), thanks to Amy for the IA medical assistance, and thanks to Mike and C for the comic relief, without everyone's help and support we would never get through this process!!

So on to some Alek updates. He is doing so well on the potty training front both at home and at school--definitely worth bragging about! He has gotten a bit aggressive, but we are blaming daddy on that! Those full contact baseball and football games they play each night have now filtered over to school and we got a little bad report today of Alek tackling a little boy. So daddy has been asked to dial it down a notch!! Otherwise he is doing great, his language expands daily and it is so fun to hear him talk and sing. We just love his little personality.
Here is a picture of our future Penn State quaterback (although I secretly hope he takes up a little less of a contact sport!). If you click on the below link there is a little video we took of Alek, it is dark, but you get the picture!


http://www.dropshots.com/day.php?userid=86280&cdate=20060921&ctime=173231