Andrew and Pictures of St. Pete

The past couple of days have been real nice.  We have visited Andrew for the past 2 days.  Both days we were able to take him outside.  Yesterday we had a lot of fun.  Andrew was busy with the toys, crawling and standing, and playing with a ball.  He seemed to have a lot of fun.  He is almost certainly a southpaw.  I tried to give him some banana and he got a very odd look on his face.  I'm pretty sure he has never had banana before from that expression.  Andrew ultimately fell asleep before we had to leave.

Today our visit was a bit different.  Evidently, Andrew had received a vaccination yesterday.  Plus, his caregiver told us he did not sleep well.  Andrew was quite tired and wasn't as interested in playing.  He preferred to just snuggle instead.  He fell asleep after about 20 minutes of our visit, and then woke up and began playing again.  His caregiver was telling us to make sure we gave him music lessons when we got home.  She seemed to be quite fond of Andrew. 

Okay, now I will share some pictures of our visit to St. Petersburg:

Here is one of the few pictures of both me and Vernon together.  I was a bit skittish in asking strangers to take pictures, but here we reciprocated with another group.  We are in front of the Peterhoff Palace:

Here is a picture of me in front of the River Neva in St. Petersburg.  The Hermitage museum is the blue building to the left of the picture.

This is Vernon in front of one of the many beautiful fountains at Peterhoff.  We took a boat to get to Peterhoff and it was a bit rainy, but the fountains in the gardens were simply beautiful.

And here I am after a long day at the Hermitage museum, ready for my favorite snack:

And finally, although we didn't get anything here, I thought it was a good commercial picture to put in.  Can you read the Russian?

I will post more pictures later, but this was a few of the highlights in St. Petersburg.  Tomorrow we will be very busy.  We will start just before 9:00 and we will go to the courthouse to get the court order for the adoption.  We then have to go to several other places.  As it can take about 2 hours to get from one end of Moscow to the other, we are planning for a long day.  On Saturday we will get Andrew.  We will bring cakes to the baby home as it is customary to bring cakes to maternity homes and baby homes after a birth or adoption.  We will post more later!