Day 11

Wednesday, April 21, 2010. We woke up this morning at about 6am. The sun comes right through our bedroom window starting at about 5:30, so we’re rising pretty early here. The breakfasts here at the hotel are actually quite good, and after some negotiation, are included in our room cost. Breakfast consists of: an omelet with ham, yogurt, cabbage salad (hold the mayo, please!), homemade cheese, bread, juice, and coffee.

Today we got our official paperwork done! Natalia got the letters of “favorable determination” from both the orphanage director AND then Inspector. These documents together could have legally taken up to 17 days to receive, but Natalia got them for us in only 3. She also applied for our court date, which gets the 7-day clock running. We are putting the documents on the overnight train tomorrow, since you can only submit paperwork to the SDA in Kiev on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Nastya will get everything submitted on Friday, and with some luck (and a lot of prayer), we should have our court date late next week. If it doesn’t happen at that time, then we get delayed another week because of the weekend and the holidays (1st week in May), so everyone please pray hard that we get our court date for next week!

We went shopping before visiting the girls for a couple of hours and bought a prepaid cell phone for Aylona so that the girls can all keep in touch. We also picked up some hair accessories for Kristina and Anastasia since they were complaining about hair in their faces. We had a really great time laughing with them later at the orphanage. There isn’t much to do when we visit, so we tend to start making things up, play tic tac toe and hangman on our iPhones, or look at photos. It started raining today, but luckily we had an umbrella with us! (Thanks, Eddy!)

We met the Higgins this evening. They are here to pick up their three girls after returning home for the 10 day waiting period. We weren’t expecting them to get in for another week or so because of all of the mess with the volcano and the airlines. They are a very nice couple from Georgia who were part of the same hosting program that we did.
We had dinner tonight at a place that Natalia found called “Salvador Dali”, which was really very good. They had pictures of Cuba and Old Havana, and the food was excellent. The menus were in English, which is always a treat since we don’t need Natalia to translate it for us. We made it back to the hotel and turned in for the night early.