VOLGOGRAD

Ever heard of it? Me neither. But, guess what? Our child is in Volgograd!! We don’t know who our specific child is yet, but we are being registered in the Volgograd region of Russia so that is where our child is! Craziness. Storytime…

I was out of town for the past 3 days at an awesome staff retreat at Lay Lake. Side note: I love my coworkers. I carpooled on my way up and we got delayed because I had a spur of the moment conference call that I had to be on. (This is all pertinent to the story, so stick with me.) We pulled over at a fast food restaurant so that I could concentrate on the call and the girls I was riding with ate while I was on my call. Since we were running late I got my food to go and asked one of the girls to drive my car the rest of the way so that I could eat. When we were about two exits away from where we needed to get off the interstate and drive 30 minutes down a country road to get to our lake house, I get a call from our adoption worker, Terri. She tells me that Russia wants us to register in the Volgograd region and she needs me to sign a couple of documents and overnight them to her. Russia only accepts paperwork on Thursday’s, so if we couldn’t get it to her then we would have to wait another week.

Here’s the kicker…I ask her if Russia randomly assigns you to a region and she says that no, they normally assign you to a region once they have a particular child in mind!!! What, what? Now this child could be already available for adoption, or almost ready for adoption, we don’t know but we do know that this process is moving VERY quickly and our baby is in Volgograd!!!

Now back to my story…so when she tells me all of this I am freaking out, literally shaking. God thing #1 - I was not driving, my coworker was. My debate was…track down a FedEx/UPS store in the middle of nowhere and be very late to our meetings or head to the meeting and wait a week. We decided on option 1. :) God thing #2 - If we hadn’t been running late because of the unexpected conference call we would have been at the lake house already and would not have gotten back out and driven an hour out of our way to sign the papers. Therefore we would have had to wait another week! God TOTALLY orchestrated it all!!

So with the help of my trusty iPhone and TomTom (what did we do before technology???) we found this…

Bar-D Western Store that handily doubles as a Fed-Ex/UPS store.  And this…

is where I sat to print off the forms from my email that I needed to sign. Note the deer above my head. (Of course, keeping with what you could imagine from our location, the computer was a dinosaur and I had to call my worker back to have her send me the forms in a different format, still had problems downloading, but finally got what I needed). And this…

is the gun and pawn shop one of my coworkers had to seek out to find a blue pen for me to sign my forms! NO one keeps blue pens around these days and Russia needs every signature to be in blue ink. Another side note: These pictures are not painting a pretty picture of Alabama…it’s not all like this, I promise.

It was quite an adventure to say the least, but $26 dollars later we got them mailed off! Since I wasn’t with Barry, he had to leave work early to get his papers sent overnight also…but we did it! God got those papers in the right hands at exactly the right time! Now we wait and see if this is really going down as fast as it appears it might. Please be praying that God continues to orchestrate things in His perfect timing!!!!