Shopping!

We spent a good part of the morning shopping for our trip. In Russia, its good custom to bring gifts to the people who you visit and who help you. So, we bought gifts for the orphanage director & staff, our facilitators from the adoption agency, and for our driver. This gift shopping is not complete but, we definitely got a good start on it today!



We also bought some toys for our little one! This was very exciting and a bit emotional. We are told not to expect to get these back, and it was hard not to buy everything in Toys-R-Us, but we bought a few things for our 1.5 hour visit. We still need to get some snacks and I'd also like to get him/her a small fuzzy stuffed animal.



We bought some great items of clothes to donate to the orphanage. Ken thought of a great idea to go to goodwill and buy a cheap suitcase ($10), fill it with donations, then just leave the goods and the suitcase in Russia. So, we did this. My dad is getting us diaper rash cream and baby powder from his work, so hopefully, we can fill out suitcase!







We decided that since we will not in Russia all that long, we do not need to bring our large sized toiletries, so we bought travel-sized containers today as well. We got some camera batteries, and an outlet converter.

Ken got our visa package sent to New York today, so keep your fingers crossed that all goes well in that department and we get our visas with time to spare! Its strange not to have our passports with us, but in the mail waiting to be delivered to the Russian Consulate! Safe travels passports!