Keeping Christmas - Dec. 18 Waiting for Passports

Last night was one of those weird I can't sleep- I'm in the wrong time zone kind of nights. The kids slept fine. I stayed up to 3:30am reading a book that L and B had loved. I'm going through my reading material faster than I thought, so I will have to get creative later in the week.

When I awoke at 11:30 my first thought was "Darn. We slept through breakfast." Life is not so bad when your primary concern for that day is whether or not you made it to the breakfast buffet before it closed. And yet, it is still a different rhythm from being at home. I am not constantly doing laundry, so I now have time on my hands. Foreign concept.

Today we are waiting in a stairwell with many Latvians seeking to get their passports processed too. On the frosty walk over to the passport office I am thankful for warm coats, cuddle duds, scarves, and gloves. Inside, the buildings are quite warm, so I now see why many people walking to work have less layers than I would imagine. They would stifle once they got inside.

I am very impressed with a woman wearing a full-length fur coat and beaver style fur hat reading a book in Russian. She whipped out a collection of plastic grocery sacks and lined the stairwell before she sat down. People who live here are prepared for wet dirty snowy surfaces. Even though I don't speak Russian I smiled and tapped my forehead and pointed to the bags. "Very smart." She smiled and understood and rattled off something in Russian that I didn't understand, but it was a nice exchange.

The "guess what number is on my back" also works while waiting in stairwells when your kids' electronics run out of charge.

We went ahead and read all 24 days of our advent calendar. This shouldn't surprise me as my children always mysteriously eat all 24 days of their advent chocolate calendars early at home too. We are ready for Christmas and counting the days down... Tuesday (Happy Polar Express Day. MJ don't forget to wear your pajamas to school). Wednesday (Happy Birthday Mary Jayne! Have fun with Grandmama. We will miss you!) Kids, have fun at your school parties.

The office is now processing number 300 and we are number 311. Things are looking up! Math lesson in the stairwell. If we are number 311 and the sign is now serving 304, how many people are ahead of us? If we've been here 30 minutes, what time do you think we'll go to lunch?

 

We saw another family that looked like they could be adopting on the flight to Riga. We saw them again at the passport office. Yep! They are doing the same thing that we are doing. It's that feeling you have like when you decide to go to Disney World for vacation and see that several other thousand families are also in the same line that you are waiting in to ride Space Mountain. Hey! You, too?

We received the kids new Latvian passports with their new American names (in Latvian).

Will became Vils Kastello Deiviss and Natalia Eliana Deivisa

Vilnis...Vils....Will........ Davis...Deiviss...Deivisa

No wonder there is so much confusion at the airports about who we are and why we are traveling under so many different names. I'm starting to understand the Ellis Island spelling of names thing. MacFarland, McFarland, McFarlane.

I wish that I had taken a picture of their first passport pictures for my "baby" books. They didn't give them back like they do in the US. (Or maybe they don't give them back, but we have a bunch of Andy's for some reason. Am I married to a secret agent?) They were the earliest photos I had, and I will miss their baby faces at 4 and 8 when they first applied for the hosting program.

We were able to FaceTime the family at our favorite Double Coffee for lunch (1:30 pm our time, 6:30 am theirs) and stayed an unusually long time. I would have felt guilty taking a table so long in the US where you can almost feel the servers telling you it's time to move on so that they can make some more tips. Here people linger, and I wasn't in the mood to give up a good wifi connection.

When you are a little boy, playing in dirty snow scraped off the side of the road is perfectly cool.

It started to get dark at 3:00 pm, so we headed back to the room. We'll have to get Will to the park another day. I wouldn't do very well in a dark cold climate long term. I'd turn into a permanent loafer drinking too much cocoa and piling on the covers. I even put my exercise clothes on, but so far I've just been sitting here typing propped up against down pillows!

The kids apparently love a Latvian soap opera which cracks me up. We did find a Latvian version of the Jungle Book characters cartoon, and a claymation Wallace and Grommit type cartoon where the animation is about like that of the classic Christmas Rudolph and Frostys. It was dubbed over in a language that none of us recognized, but you'll take what you can get when the alternatives are Latvian soap operas and CNN heated discussions about recent tragedies that I did not wish my future school-attenders to see.

 

Eventually I did get up off my....down-filled pillows and did some Zumba and Pilates around the hotel room. The kids thought this was hysterical as I jumped around. We did some school and headed back out to one of our favorite pizza restaurants here, The Fly Cafe. I had one of those sugary fizzy Sprites that Gennie and I love (and that I never buy at home) and miscalculated the amount of pizza we needed in centimeters...so we'll have take out and probably another round of crazy Mom exercising around the hotel room tomorrow!