Day 3 - tourists for a day

Today was our main sight seeing day. We are waiting on a referral letter that allows us to travel to the city where our son’s institution is. We just learned this afternoon that it won’t be ready until tomorrow, but we didn’t know that when we started our day.

We left our apartment and headed down the hill to St. Michael’s cathedral. It is a famous landmark and close the river, that Brad wanted to see. It is a Russian Orthodox church and very beautiful outside and inside. I had to cover my head with the scarf when we sent inside because of local customs and we were not allowed to take any pictures inside. It was very dark inside...only lit by long thin candles that people placed in candelabras in front of different life sized icons or statues or Jesus or the various Saints. It was a little strange to us that there was a nativity scene where people laid money or fruit. It seemed almost like the Hindu temples I have seen in Asia.

We walked from one end of the city to the other today it felt like, visiting the river and walking down a path filled with handicraft vendors. There was a lady who was feeding stray cats under her stall...she must have had 6 or 7 kitties running up when she pulled out the food scraps for them!

We passed a restaurant that had a menu in English so we stopped in for lunch. We were pleasantly surprised by how good the food was. I had what was called Russian cabbage soup that was really saurkraut and ham soup in a tomato broth with sour cream and dill. Brad had chicken kiev with sautéed vegetables. It was a fillet of chicken wrapped around herbed butter that was battered and fried. They gave him bread to dip in the butter that was melted. Both were excellent even though they sound really strange. We ordered Ukrainian crepes with poppyseed filling for dessert. They were not terrible and very popular in Ukraine, but I would probably not order them again. They needed a lot more sugar in them!

We ended the day by buying a few souvenirs and then walking home. On the way home we found a supermarket where we bought cooked sausage (kind of like salami) and bread for dinner on the train. We were frozen solid at this point and Brad bought a coffee from on of the little espresso bar trucks they seem to have everywhere.

We are hoping to travel tomorrow night to our region. The delay is due to a computer crash that is hopefully resolved soon.

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.

We arrived in Kiev today after a thankfully uneventful plane ride. Aside from some turbulence and mild nausea, we landed in Kiev around lunch time. We breezed through immigration and customs without anyone even looking up at us and were greeted by our driver. I am certain he is used to bleary eyed half asleep Americans because he took over and helped us exchange money and go grocery shopping before settling us in with cell phones and internet at our apartment. We were hungry enough to eat cardboard and call it steak, but were pleased to find that the lunch meat our driver selected for us to make sandwiches with was delicious. He also helped us buy, jam, chocolate, butter, eggs, sliced cheese, milk and juice.

After lunch we were fighting sleep (we only got about 3 hours of sleep on the plane) so we decided to go explore the city. It was snowing and beautiful...enormous fluffy snowflakes. We walked about 10 minutes to Independence Square and explored an outdoor Christmas market. We finally had to return to our apartment to thaw out and prepare for our big day tomorrow. We have out government appointment tomorrow where we will officially agree to meet our new son.

End of the Rainbow

On January 14th we board a plane to head to Easton's country to meet him for the first time. This is such great news that it deserved a post all of its own.

We have his bed all ready and waiting for him!

Reluctant Blogger

I am indeed a reluctant blogger.  I love the idea of capturing family memories on a blog complete with corresponding photos, but the reality of my life is that I am to busy actually living it, to blog about it!  That being said, here is the catch up post...

We all tried a selection of foods from Easton's country. It is readily available where we live, but unfortunately, it just might be the one international cuisine that we all would rather not eat ever again! Elijah and Anna are troopers and agreed that we would all eat it for as long as Easton wants to until he is comfortable with American food. I am so proud of them!

We spent a non-traditional Thanksgiving in the City so that we could get up at the crack of dawn and watch the parade. We had a great spot right at the front! We followed this by lunch at a deli and then a trip to see Santa at Macy's. This was the kids first time seeing Santa since we have lived overseas almost every Christmas where there just wasn't a Santa available. They were both pretty intrigued by the idea, especially since we watched "Miracle on 34th Street" before we went.

December 9th brought us to Elijah's 8th birthday. (How did he get this old!) It was a crazy house full of little boys and so I don't have the best pictures. :) At one point his little friend came up to me holding a play sword in one hand and a bloody front tooth in the other, and announced, "My tooth fell out!" I was seconds away from a heart attack when he explained that his tooth had been loose for weeks.

Christmas this year was low key...just the way we like it. We are much more about quality time and family trips than big gifts. We went to see THE tree in the city and then baked a bunch of cookies together. On Christmas morning we had a annual crepe breakfast and a slow morning of opening gifts and hanging out. Perfect.