Today we met the girls

Today is the day. We leave hotel at 10:00 and go to orphanage. Before meeting the girls we meet with Victor, the director of the orphanage. Then we met Pixie. I don't even remember Sergie bringing her in the room; all of a sudden she was just there, sitting in my lap looking up at me like she was thinking "I know you." For me it was love at 1st site. She has the greatest smile, Sergie says she is always smiling. She does not talk to us. She likes the dog puppet and books, she appears very curious. She played well with Rich and ate goldfish crackers. Physically she is very small and has sketchy medical history, but she looks healthy. She was left at the hospital at birth and the only thing we know about the mother is that she has other children and lives with a man who is not Pixie’s father. She has all vaccinations, has had pneumonia, broke her leg 1 year ago because she had shingles, ear infection 1 year ago, chicken pox 1 month ago. We both fell in love with her and know that we want to adopt her. We spent about 45 minutes with her and then it was time for the kids to go to lunch.
We went back to orphanage at 4 PM. Next we met we meet our second referral, Sergie said she is very active child, but she is frightened at first. She is beautiful, black hair, dark eyes. She is heavier than Pixie, and seems to be all muscle. She sits quietly and just stares at us, does not smile at all. Just as she starts to adjust, she has to go for snack. They accidentally brought out the third and fourth referrals at the same time. Referral number 3 starts screaming and they take her back to her ward, which is OK, she was a little younger than we want.
Referral number 4 was terrified and kept trying to hide behind the social worker, she looked so tiny and lost with these big beautiful brown eyes (one of which is crossed), clutching stuffed clown. She was very afraid of Rich and Sergie. It took a while but I finally get her in my arms, she just sits quietly taking every thing in. Then we finally get her into Rich's lap. She did not want to leave at end of visit, I think we even saw a smile just before the caretakers came to take her back to the ward. In that brief smile we saw the most adorable dimples. Now we have to decide between referral number 2 and number 4, they are both really cute, number 4 seemed more comfortable with us. We leave at 6:00 and go to dinner with S, he is wonderful and his attempts to speak English makes conversing fun. We laugh a lot. For example, he said several times that he needs to meet with "garden committee", I assumed this had something to do with gardening, which I can't figure why he has to go to a gardening committee in Bratsk. This afternoon he said that tomorrow we have to meet with garden committee; turns out he was saying guardian committee, which are the social workers for the ophans. We all had a big laugh over that.
Back in our room we get ready for bed and talk about the girls, we are both torn between referral numbers 2 and 4. Since there is no air conditioning, we have to sleep with window open. Our window looks out over a large open square. A lot of people gather there and it is very noisy until after midnight since the sun doensn't go down until after midnight.

View at 11:15pm from our hotel.