March 3, Tuesday (afternoon)
Yulia picked us up in a cab. Okay, so you know me well….I forgot my passport and had to run, “literally” up the walk, across the yard, up the elevator, get through two doors in our flat, find my passport and then reverse all the above details. When I mention the two doors, it seems to be a pattern here. You unlock one door with a key, only to open it and see another door right behind it. It is more like a nice paneled door. I noticed that in the State Department they had the same door situation. It is quite different because you can’t see through either door so you are wondering who will be standing there when you open the second one. We arrived at the State Department and Yulia showed us the front of the building. Then she took us around back to the door (or the two doors) that we walked through to go into a very small, skinny room which was more like a hallway with a couch in it. The one nice thing is that there were pictures of children. So we waited about 20 minutes and then Yulia came and got us to again wait in the stairwell of the building. Yulia asked if we were nervous. I told her yes, but not in a scary way but excited way. Then a very young, stylish girl by the name of Irina motioned to Yulia and we walked up the stairs into a nice office. In the office, we were told to sit on a couch. We ended up all being around a small coffee table. Irina said a lot of words to Yulia and then Yulia interpreted by asking us to tell her what we did for a living, how many children and what ages are they and what children do we want. I had Paul do the honors. Then she showed (1) set of siblings…a boy and girl. Honestly, I had no connection. Then she went out and brought in about 8 more sets of boy/girl siblings, one group of 3 that had a boy that was a teenager. There was still no connecting feeling and honestly, I felt like these weren’t the ones. Irina had left the room again and we are both staring at the photo pages and asking questions about birth parents and health issues. I guess we were hoping that something said would help us make a decision. We decided to go with our first thought that we wanted to stay with children under Nathan’s age. This quickly eliminated all but 2 choices. Paul leaned toward one set, I leaned toward the other; however still I really felt no feeling that jumped out and said, “you need to take these”. Then Irina came back in the room holding one picture and said a lot of words to Yulia. It was explained that the girl had a younger brother that was not freed up for adopting, yet. It would be two more weeks until his paperwork would permit him to be referred. She said that the little girl, that I will call “D” was approved to be adopted and we could travel to see her. She is 8 years old. Her brother who we will call “A” is 5. They are both in the same orphanage in Southern Ukraine. Yeah!!! Warmer weather! We only could see a picture of the little girl. They could not show us a picture of the boy because he is not in the system yet. They did say that we would be able to visit with both children and go ahead and decide if we felt a connection. Yulia said that “if we love them” we can start the paperwork and in two weeks we will get a referral for the boy. So, tomorrow we go back to the State Department around 5 pm and pick up our referral papers for “D”. Then we travel on a train to the orphanage city. We were somewhat anxious about the train ride, knowing that we would have to sleep overnight in a compartment for 4 people. We had read about the Ukrainian people liking to drink and share food on the train. Yulia laughed when we told her, because she said she always buys up all 4 tickets so we don’t have to share with anyone. RELIEF! We laughed too. I just couldn’t see myself sleeping with strange men! So we were waiting for a cab and Yulia said she had a friend that she wanted us to talk to that had met the girl. This was another God thing, I do believe. He spoke good English and told us that she had traveled to the U.S. two years ago for a hosting camp. An older couple had selected her and had even traveled to Ukraine to adopt her. However, because of age requirements they were too old to adopt the younger brother. Since you are unable to split up siblings in Ukraine, she was not adopted. He said that she was a mild, sweet child and pretty. He had not seen the brother, but knew he was in the same orphanage. However he was in another building across the fence and would soon be moved up to an older boys building because of his age. We do know that they were abandoned by their birth mother and there is no information about a father. We also know that after they were abandoned their mother was found and rights were terminated 2 years ago. I am also wondering if the girl will feel any hesitation in bonding with us, because of knowing that the first adoption did not work out. This is all just speculation, though. We also know that the boy has Strabismus, which is “lazy eye”, but we are confident it can be corrected with eye glasses or outpatient surgery.

So that is pretty much it. Walking outside, we felt a relief. We are excited about our travels to the orphanage village tomorrow night and going to the orphanage on Thursday. We will be able to visit with the children and then make a decision if we want to go forward in the process. Again, we say, thank you to our Lord and Savior for his guiding hand. We are amazed at how smoothly God has blessed us through this process, thus far. Back at our flat, Paul made us bacon sandwiches for lunch. He is now taking a nap, so I think I might join him. It has been a day filled with a lot of excited energy. It is exhausting. It is 3:05 and later we will take a walk around and try to find a place for dinner.