Some of the things we need to do still

Other than just waiting on news of our paperworks progress we need to take care of these big things too:

1. Decide on a Pediatrician.
2. Hire an international adoption doctor. {Once we are presented with a child we will be given the child’s medical history report which will be written in Russian. This doctor will help us understand what it says. Our child will also visit this doctor at least once upon our return home.}
3. Finish painting the babies nursery. {I just got the paint the other day so we will probably do this over the next week or so.}
4. Decide if we are going to use a travel agency or work directly with the airlines to book our flights. {Our plan is to make only one trip to Kazakhstan. This trip will take 6 to 9 weeks or longer. Our other option is to make 2 or 3 shorter trips.}
5. Make our current packing list more manageable. It is around 7 pages long now and still growing.
6. Start buying and setting stuff aside to be packed. Decide on which suitcases we will take and how we will manage our load of stuff. {Getting to Kazakhstan isn’t really a probably it is once we are there that the amount of stuff we have to move around can start being a huge problem. We will be flying into one of the two major cities Astana or Almaty. Where our child lives will determine the rest of our trip. We may have to take a train, bus, taxi or in country flight to our child’s home. If we have to take an in country flight we will have big restrictions on the amount of luggage we have and how much it weighs. Rumor has it that some families have had to spend $100s of dollars to just get their luggage to their destination. If we plan ahead hopefully we can figure out a way to avoid this from happening to us.
7. Gather together all the documents we will need to take with us. We have a list of required documents that we have to take for the different government agencies.
8. Check with our bank to get clean money. We have to travel with brand new American cash. Apparently they don’t like “used” money.
9. Learn some basic Russian words. Again this is something we probably should have started months ago. It is not necessary to do since we will have a translator and a driver assigned to us but we thought it may be helpful for the days or hours that we are left alone. We bought some lessons on tape to listen too and we have bought a Russian phrasebook to take with us. We have this same phrasebook in Spanish that we take when we go to Mexico and it has been so helpful so we have to assume this Russian one will be just as handy to have.
   

We have more than this on our “To Do” list but these are the big ones.