Resurgence of hope

Today was a milestone day, and a big one at that. We started the day with a trip to the Russian citizenship office to sign some papers and receive Malachi's new birth certificate with us listed as the parents and the adoption certificate, this was the point when it all sunk in and for the first time felt somewhat real. The only thing that is keeping it from feeling really real is the fact that all the documents are in Cyrillic characters and could say "Jason Tank has a big nose and smells like a monkey" for all we know. We somewhat blindly signed whatever documents were put in front of us while they were translated on the fly by our translator. What a crazy feeling to see the name we chose for our son on a Russian citizenship document. After the citizenship office our coordinator (known as Katia from here on out) took us to the baby house and we saw our boy for about an hour. We left the baby house knowing that we will be here for a couple more days but not knowing how many for sure, but we knew we needed food. So we went to the store and while we were there our driver got a call and said we needed to be at the passport office at 12:30pm, too bad it was 12:19 when he got the call and we weren't done shopping and the passport office is all the way on the other side of town. We finished speed shopping and then got into what turned out to be Mr. Toad's wild (safe, for all you parents reading) ride. We darted through the Siberian streets through the sometimes blinding exhaust of the Tomsk buses, and made it to yet another Russian building, the passport office. We chased our driver up the stairs to the third floor only to find Katia standing in the hall and she told us to sit down it will be a few minutes. We're used to the hurry up and wait syndrome that seems to have struck most of the people we have met in this process along the way. Well it wasn't long before we were standing nervously in an office trying to smile at the nice Russian lady that seemed to be speaking in some sort of code as she looked over our documents and continually questioned Katia about different portions therein. Several minutes passed and there was, from all we could tell, a heated debate between Katia and the passport agent. All I could tell, from all the Russian I understand and my ability to interpret body language, is that Katia wanted something and the passport lady couldn't or didn't want to give it to her, she looked very distraught so we were too. At one point I turned to our driver, who speaks a fairly good amount of English and he tells me that "Katia was hoping to get the passport tomorrow but we must wait until 30 days", to which I responded, somewhat dejected, "thirty days!?", he said "yes". To say the least my heart dropped into my shoe, and I really had to try hard to hold it all together. They finished their discussion and I thought it was strange when Katia told the Lady "paseeba" (thanks) and then we walked out of the room. We stopped in the hall and talked about what just happened and in turns out that our driver's English has at least one flaw and this one almost made me cry, he was calling Wednesday Thursday which his pronunciation came out as "thirty day". What a stinking relief!!! I don't know what I would do if we had to wait 30 days to bring him home, but luckily we don't have to answer that question :). So after that was solved we were happy to know that we will have his passport no later then Wednesday which means we will definitely leave at least a day early. The passport lady gave katia her cell phone number to call her tomorrow night at 5pm to check on the status of the passport and it may or may not be ready. If it is ready before 7 we can go to the airline office to change our tickets for Wednesday morning. If this happens we could be home Friday or Saturday, maybe even earlier if our coordinator in Moscow has as much pull there as Katia does here.
Continue to pray for everything to go smoothly and for favor with the officials at the embassy in Moscow.

Here are two completely unrelated video first one is him and his group in music class, second one is him imitating his Daddy blowing up balloons.