Cancun Trip

We went on our first family vacation this past weekend to Cancun, Mexico. Randy's brother Bill got married to Amy on the beach in Cancun. We had planned on attending the wedding from the time they announced the date and location and thought we would be okay with the adoption since we had originally asked for our dossier to be registered in March and didn't think we'd be home this early with a child. After we found out our new adoption timeline we decided not to attend the wedding because we thought it would not be possible to get Artem back into the U.S. with his Russian passport without getting another visa for him. We were also worried it would be too hard on Artem to travel so soon after returning home from Russia, so we cancelled our reservations and told our family we wouldn't be able to attend. Last week we found out he could travel on his Russian passport and the visa inside his passport is a residence visa and as long as it is properly endorsed by customs in Atlanta when we first arrived in the country on April 19th we would be fine to travel. We decided to go to the wedding after all since Artem has proven to be such a "on the go" kid to make it a surprise and not tell anyone.


The trip turned out great and we managed to pull off the greatest surprise to Randy's family when we arrived at the resort. We stayed at the Iberostar Paraiso Maya resort and it proved to be absolutely incredible! We highly recommend this resort to any of our friends and we would return in a heartbeat. It was beautiful and their website does not do this place justice. It was so family friendly and Artem took his first swim in a pool, his first time to the ocean, and his first wedding and it just happened to be a beach wedding. Gorgeous! Artem had so much fun and did great meeting lots of new people and charming the heck out of everyone he met. The resort is all inclusive which worked out great and we had several restaurants to chose from at each meal, but we mostly ended up at the buffet for breakfast and lunch which was perfect for our bottomless pit, Artem. We've told people how much our son eats but finally at dinner on Sunday night, Amy said, "You keep saying this boy can eat but now I've witnessed it firsthand and omigoodness!"


We hated to leave Cancun and are already talking about taking another trip in November for our anniversary/Artem's birthday. I've attached a few pictures of our trip. We took over 400 pictures and had some family pictures taken that we want to use for our adoption announcement.


Oh to win the lottery and live like that year round!!