Baking Easter Cookies

The children love to help me out with stuff. Here they are helping to bake Easter cookies. Of course the baking of the cookies was done entirely for their benefit anyway. As you can see, I got lazy and bought the prefab cookies complete with a bunny face. Alexander got tired of taking turns with the spatula and decided to speed up the process by dumping cookies onto the baking stone and table. They barley missed the floor.

Yesterday, a social worker came over to our house to interview us for our first post-placement report due April 24, which will be six months since we adopted the children. Russia requires four of these reports from adoptive families. In addition to the report due at 6 months, others will be required at 1 year, 2 years and 3 years. Even though Anna and Alexander are legally our daughter and son now, this is the Russian officials' way of trying to assure themselves that their children are being well taken care of. Not that there’s anything they can do about it except halt other families from adopting in the future or lay down much more stringent requirements, which they have done. I think they have put so much emphasis on these reports because of some negative publicity about a few abusive adoptive parents. It's so important for us to cooperate because adoption agencies can be held accountable by the Russian government and be penalized or lose their accreditation to facilitate adoptions over there. Anyway, it's really not a big deal. The social worker was very nice and visited with us for about an hour and we talked about how the children are doing and all that. We'll also be sending 6-10 photos of the children to go along with the report. Almost six months already. Wow.