Things aren't looking very good right now. I had a long post about yesterdays* setback but that was worked through for the best.

Today the news from our agency director is that there are not two biological sibling girls for us to meet in NN. And there are not two unrelated girls to meet in our age range. We asked for additional information about the referrals after yesterdays travel date setback and this is what we learned. They were planning to introduce us to a different sibling set (three girls) and if that didn't work out, they had a boy/girl sibling set**.

Needless to say we disappointed. We felt OK about going on a blind trip for two reasons (1) the referrals were for exactly what we wanted - two bio-sibling girls and (2) we were told there were other girls for us to meet if the bio-siblings didn't work out.

This is all dampering our confidence in the process right now. Our agency explains the problem being that this is a new region for them so they are still working on the communication channels and relationships with the MOE / orphanages. The MOE saw that we were approved for 3, so they referred us the sibling set of 3. We are wondering why our coordinator didn't push back and ask the MOE for a sibling group of 2? If that was not possible, why were we not told that the referrals we were going to meet were for three girls before we traveled to Russia?

We have another call in to our agency tomorrow. I don't know what we are going to do next. O to 2 children was going to be tough. I just don't think we can do 3 children at once. It's very difficult to keep explaining to our agency that we want two girls and at the same time turn down these other children. (**Edited - We just found out that the other option on the table this morning, the boy/girl sibling group, were offered to the family we were going to travel with. I guess they are no longer an option for us! I thought we had until the morning to decide. Hmmm.**)

*Yesterday we learned that our coordinator would not be able to pick-up our letters of invitation until Monday. We needed this special paperwork because our region requires us to travel under an "adoption visa". So we rescheduled our dates to Oct 6-13, meeting the girls Oct 8-10. The dates worked out better because we could stay an extra day in Moscow, and get a non-stop flight home on Sunday afternoon.