Reunited with Gavin Victor - day 1 in Abakan

We didn't get much sleep before having to go get the medical exams done. It started out ok, but turned into a long afternoon. We went to a large outpatient doctors building. Oleg used to be some kind of Doctor before and knows a lot of people there. He had setup some kind of deal with the Chief Dr to allow us to see many Dr's quickly. They don't have general practitioners here, they have all specialists. We walked around the building seeing several doctors...they would ask us 3-4 questions max, and then sign and stamp our form. Russia has a free national healthcare system, but the cost is that people have to wait all day to see Dr's. We felt bad because the chief Dr had assigned a nurse of some kind to walk us past all these people to be seen by each dr. We were finally able to see Gavin around 4:30pm. He was awesome just like he was the first trip. He came in and had a huge smile on his face when he saw us...and he is walking on his own now! The caretaker had a picture of Shannon and I that we had left on the first trip, when she said "mama, papa" , Gavin pointed at the picture and smiled. It was obvious they had been showing him the pic while we were gone (the pic of us at the top right of this page). They let us take him outside and walk around with him for a while. Shannon walked with him up and down a sidewalk without a hand. We each held him and talked to him. He kept smiling and patting us on the shoulder...he kept saying sounds and one of them sounded like dada. He doesn't seem to have grown much and just needs better nutrition. We were only there for 30 minutes because we had to go back to the Dr offices again to have one more signature b/c a Dr had not been there earlier. Alya, the current interpreter, had left us earlier for a meeting with her students... so Oleg called Sveta (translator from first trip) and put her on the phone with Shannon. We found out that Sveta was not able to make it this trip b/c a large group of German tourists came to Krasnyarsk (where she lives, 350mi north) and she is being paid to translate for them on their stay. Sveta was actually a former student of Alya at the Kakassia State University here in Abakan. Alya is working hard to understand our pattern of english, she is trained in the British dialect. She asks us a lot of questions about how we would normally say certain things. She is very kind, takes the job seriously, and we like her a lot. We had only slept 2 hours within the last 24, so we came back to the hotel and slept until 10:45pm...its now 11:30pm, but we will likely be up most of the night. Tomorrow, we will prepare for court by practicing with Alya for questions the judge may ask, and to review our homestudy which is where a lot of the questions may come from. Alya is going to take us shopping, we are going to buy Gavin a coat because it's cold in Moscow...but is very nice here. We should also get to see Gavin again for a longer period of time.

Thank you for all the posts and support. Checking and reading the posts is one of the highlights of our day!