His Name! And prayers for the 29th.....

Oh...In all this chaos, My dear friend Amy pointed out I got ahead of myself with last night's post. We decided to name our little guy Charlie, I guess I forgot to tell you! After Chad's grandfather. After we visited him for three days, we were surprised to know that we could either go visit him on Thursday (driving 3 hours, spending a shorter amount of time with him (only an hour or two), drive 7 hours then back to St. Petersburg) or we could "get a jump on the court process" and go Petition the Court and submit all of our court documents. So with great debate, we decided not to go see him on Thursday and just go straight to court and then back to St. Pete for our flight out Friday morning. Wednesday night after dinner as we were preparing to "pour ourselves" into bed, absolutely exhausted, our host family said "when you go to the DOE tomorrow, you have to tell his name." WHAT?!?!?" Yet another BIG surprise. We thought we had another three months to figure this out. We wrestled with the gravity of this decision all night. We kept returning to "we want his name to mean something". So we choose Charlie, after a strong, wonderful man of God. A man I never had the honor of meeting- Chad's maternal grandfather. He was a Charles, but was always known as "Charlie". I am a big fan of naming kids what you intend to call them, so we skipped the formality and just named him "Charlie". His middle name is going to be my mom's maiden name- "Harmon". Which was quite fun having the translator try to pronounce. "Hall-o-mone" "Har-o-man"

But it was so important to us that a child without a history, be given a history. Two wonderful families (plus our last name, so you could really say three families) given to him. So.....with that explained, here is the latest news: 

        

The United States is sending a delegation to hold talks with Russian officials, now scheduled to take place on April 29 in Moscow.  The United States plans to emphasize the importance of intercountry adoptions between our two countries, and will discuss our mutual concerns about how to better protect the welfare and rights of children and all parties involved in the intercountry adoption processs.  On April 25, Secretary of State Clinton spoke by telephone with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.  The issue of adoptions was raised.   They discussed our shared commitment to the common goal of protecting the welfare and rights of children and all parties involved in intercountry adoptions.  

Many thousands of Russian children have found loving, safe and permanent homes in the United States through intercountry adoption.  Families in the United States have adopted more than 50,000 children from Russia.