Day 2 - Referral Day

My lovely husband cooked me a breakfast today of scrambled eggs and fresh bread with butter and jam. We made coffee on the stove, twice...the first time we accidentally put salt in it instead of sugar! In hindsight, I should have labelled the ziplock bags of sugar and salt that I brought from home. It was nice to have a lazy morning since our appointment was not until 12:00. Our driver spoke perfect English and picked us up outside our apartment and walked us in to our appointment. We are very well taken care of here and it is quite obvious that the team helping us here are excellent at what they do.

Words just cannot describe what it was like to see the picture of our sweet son today. He was happy and laughing in the picture with an adorable squishiness about him. The picture was about a year old, but it was the first good full body picture we have seen of him . Our appointment with the SDA was very easy and pleasant. It is a winter wonderland once again today, which I am thrilled about since I love snow. It did make walking in 4 inch heels a little precarious, but I never get to dress up and wear heels anymore so I refused to miss my opportunity just because of a little snow!

After waiting just a moment, our facilitator took us into a small office where we were introduced to the director. She was very nice and showed us a copy of our son’s file where we saw his picture and were given some basic information about him. We know that he was placed for adoption by his mother immediately after his birth and that his father’s identity is unknown. He has a grandmother who is living and two siblings, a boy and a girl who are 18 and 20 years old. They have never met each other. This is difficult to hear but hopefully we can get more of their information so that our son can contact them in the future if he decides that he wants to.

We have learned that he was transferred to a mental institution a little over a year ago and that we will be the first family to adopt from his institution. It is our prayer that the Lord will use us to pave the way for other families to be able to adopt children from this institution. This is not the path that we would have chosen for our son or for ourselves, but God must have a plan that we are not able to see. It does give us comfort and is humbling that He would choose us to be his ambassadors in this way. We are rely on God to guide us the rest of the way through this experience.

Tonight we will have dinner with several other families who are also adopting at TGIFridays. It will be good to meet so many new friends. In the mean time we are hoping to go exploring again. I think I will change into snow boots first though. :) We were able to sleep over eight hours last night and feel really refreshed, but are a little sleepy right now and want to keep busy so that we don’t nap and throw ourselves off schedule.

Tomorrow we will leave in the evening by overnight train to reach the institution in a large city about 5 hours drive from Kiev.