Happy Valentine's Day!

Hi everyone, we're sorry we've been off the grid for awhile, but things have been a bit crazy. We arrived safely in Kiev this past Saturday, and met with our new facilitator and translator. Our appointment with the SDA to choose children was on 2/12, so we had a couple of days to get adjusted and play tourist.

We both really enjoyed what we saw of Kiev. The city is still obviously in transition, but it is very pretty, and at least where we were, very clean. The people dress fashionably, despite the cold. We hired a tour guide one day to take us over to the Lavra - a compound of multiple churches, museums and caves. The caves originally were built by monks for monks and pilgrims. There are many saints buried in the caves, and people still come for pilgrimages there. Tourists are only able to go into certain parts of the caves, but what we saw was very cool. We also went and saw St. Sophia, St. Michael's and St. Andrews. The churches here are gorgeous, the traditional onion dome that you see in pictures. We did end up getting completely lost one day, trying to find our way by ourselves. Unfortunately, this isn't the best city to get lost in, considering the different alphabet. It took a few hours, but we eventually found our way back.

Our meeting with the SDA went pretty much as expected. We were shown profiles of 4 sibling groups, all of which were older than what we initially wanted. We were also shown two single boys with some health issues. We chose a brother-sister sibling group to meet. About the SDA (for those of you who are about to go through this process): the psychologist we had was very nice. We were actually allowed to bring our translator in as they were short a translator that day. I think it helped us (at least me) to have our own person there. The one hour we had went by quickly. We narrowed it down to 2 groups pretty quickly - a sister group of 2 and the brother-sister we chose. The atmosphere over all was more relaxed than I anticipated.

The kids are in the Odessa region, south of Kiev. Our paperwork to meet them was completed on Wednesday, late afternoon, and this morning we left Kiev very early to travel to meet the kids. I have to admit that I was a bit nervous about choosing these two, only because of their ages. Scott has always been open to any children of elementary school age; I wanted to stay between 4-7 yo. The boy is 9.5 yo (10 in August) and the girl just turned 8. They are in 2nd and 1st grade here.

We got to their town and first met with the Inspector - basically, the social worker who is in charge of the orphanages in this town. We spent some time with him, then he took us over to the orphange. We went to the orphanage director's office (she is actually growing lemon trees in there! of all things) and the group of us, including our translator, sat down to talk. Her questions to us were basic: who are we? where are we from? what do we do? do we have other kids? why did we choose these children? etc.

They then went to get the kids. For now, I'm going to refer to the boy as D and the girl as A, until everything is settled. A & D walked into the room, a little shy and nervous, as to be expected. Our translator told us that at their ages, they know why foreigners are there. The director had them introduce themselves and say a few things. For instance, D's favorite class is math, and A likes to learn Ukrainian.

We then spent about an hour or so with the kids, the translator, their main care worker, and the inspector. We asked some general questions of the kids, and they were very polite and engaging. We joked around a little bit with them, and they have actually been to America before, on a hosting trip. Scott & I told our translator that we would like to come back and spend more time with them in the afternoon.

So, we went back after lunch with a few toys and some treats. We played cars and colored with them, and they opened up some more. A is very outgoing and talkative (though she needs some speach therapy), and she is very cute. D is more reserved, and more serious - you can tell he has been taking care of her for awhile. D had a lot of fun playing with the cars though, and I think will relax with us in a couple of days. Both kids are overall in very good health, though they did not have any schooling before coming to the orphanage.

We definitely felt a connection with these two, and though we have until Monday to make our final decision, we are planning to move forward with adopting them. We will be able to spend a couple of hours an afternoon with them, and more time on the weekends. We are looking forward to bonding with them while we're here, to make the transition home easier.

So, I guess what we got for Valentine's Day are our (very hopefully) new kids! :)

Now that we're settled in to the town here, we will be updating this blog regularly. We will post pictures when we are able. Right now, we've only been able to use the internet cafes, so it's a bit difficult with the photos. We're trying to get wireless in our apartment. Next time, we'll also write more about life in this little village, which is definitely more Soviet-style than Kiev was.

happy valentine's day everyone!