Court Date

Good news: we have a court date! Our adoption petition will be heard on February 14th, Valentine's Day at 10 am. That's one business day later than in our original optimistic estimate, 3 calendar days later. Suddenly the rest of our time here in Ukraine has taken shape. Day 11 will be February 25th (Happy Birthday, Amy!) This will be too late to keep our original return ticket date which was March 1st, but I'm grateful that it's slowing things down a little. We are weary from the language strain, culture stress, and the emotional energy it takes to sort out our new roles as parents, and offsite parents at that.

We can't help but looking forward to the time the girls can be with us. They are looking forward to that, too. Today the youngest one asked me if tomorrow we would all go to America. I told her (in my broken Russian which she understands even though she speaks in Ukrainian) "Tomorrow - here, the day after tomorrow - here." She continued, "then the next tomorrow, the next tomorrow, the next tomorrow, then we all go to America?" I told her, "in the train, then in the airplane, then in the car, then in America." She smiled and spun around. Later, I had Stan make sure she understood it would be a matter of weeks.

I made the mistake this week of showing the middle girl my Ipod and letting her listen to it. Now for the last 10 minutes of our visits, she does her best to beg me into leaving it with her at the orphanage. She smiles her cutest smile and begs, "Mom, music. . . pleeease!" 'Please' literally in Ukrainian means 'let there be mercy.' I guess I'm showing no mercy because my answer is always no. It's not something we can leave overnight at the orphanage. I'm relieved, however, because now I know how we'll keep her busy during all those hours traveling.

Yesterday Stan took a break from work and we got out of town for a few hours in the afternoon. We went to a village up in the mountains and started off by hiking down to a small frozen waterfall. We followed up our hike with a soak in a Transcarpathian-style hot tub (I'll let Stan fill you in on the details in a later post) then a hearty mountain feast in a rustic restaurant. Here are some of the pictures to document our afternoon out.