The plan

We are sitting in our 15th floor apartment enjoying the nice cool breeze and watching a fireworks show. I'm not sure why they are celebrating the 4th of July here in Ukraine but we are sure enjoying it.

Now that we have our court date this place seems so much more charming than it did before and we are realizing how much we are actually going to miss it when we leave. Funny how that works. We have met so many really neat people these last few weeks and part of me wishes we could somehow take them all back with us.

That is where facebook is really convenient.

Today we went to our first Ukrainian church service, in Ukrainian (with english translation via headphones). A big thank you to our new missionary friends for inviting us. We loved it. Then they invited us over for a wonderful 4th of July celebration with a couple of other American missionaries. We had such a wonderful time, and the food was so amazing! It felt more like being with old friends than with brand new friends! Later we met another family, the Shupps, for coffee. Lyndi was the one who helped us through the adoption process and we had emailed back and forth and spoken on the phone many times, and now I got to meet her in real life!

We missed our visit with the kids today but we reasoned that it is probably better that we miss a couple of visits this week so they will not be in too much of a shock when we suddenly don't show up for two weeks straight.

So here is the plan:

We plan to leave ASAP after court. We go home to be with our kids  until the mandatory 10 day wait is up. For those unfamiliar with Ukraine adoptions, the purpose of the 10 day wait is to allow any relatives to have a chance to reclaim the children, although I have never heard of that actually happening. Our kids have been orphans since birth, for over five years, so we don't anticipate this happening.

When we receive the go-ahead John will return to Ukraine with Liesel. We picked Liesel because she is gifted with little children and has an ability to get them to do things that they don't think they want to do. Hopefully she can use her child psychology skills to get Joseph to sit still on the airplane for over ten hours! Also, John's niece Heather plans to return with him. She is a college student studying Russian and special education, so we couldn't think of a better person to accompany him on his trip.

We hope that both children will be in our home sometime in August. That is a very long time to wait for us all to be together but that is just how it works, in this country, in this region.

And that is the plan, for those who have asked.