In Kiev

We cannot express how we've seen God's hand in our trip thus far. Our trip to Kiev was amazingly smooth, the flights were great and our girls did incredibly well. We spent our first full day here sleeping in (Madison pulled the record with sleeping about 16 hours!), playing together, doing schoolwork, going to the grocery store, meeting with Dr. Yuri, a Ukrainian doctor to review medical diagnosis and eating at none other than McDonalds. I'd like to think we'd get a little more adventurous with the food, but I'm not sure!

Kiev in many ways is like a European New York City. We've enjoyed our time walking about the city, taking photos (hope to post later) and taking the girls to the park. Our apartment in Kiev is nice and simple . . . just what we need. We were pleased to find that it has a washing machine and internet.

Our translator, Alla is a mover and shaker. The woman knows what she's doing and gets the job done. We feel that we are truly able to trust her and her judgment; and she seems to have a lot of influence in the right places.

We are all doing really well and enjoying our trip thus far. We have all eased into this temporary new way of life smoothly and are enjoying our time together. Madison and Mallory are really having a good time and doing a great job of listening and obeying. We are thrilled that they are on this trip with us and believe they are learning a lot in the process. Up to this point, things have been smoother than we had anticipated with everything.

AND NOW, about our appointment at the SDA. We had a very successful appointment this morning. We along with another Italian family had the first two 9am appointments of the day. We had specifically prayed that the Lord would guide which files would be shown to us and that it would be very clear as to who we should go meet. After telling the SDA staff person a little about our family and showing a photo album to her, we were shown a file of a boy about 4 years old with cleft palate. He aleady had one surgery, but would need further surgery. He was adorable and we were interested in considering him. Our translator quietly told us that his orphanage is in a region that is very complex and discouraged us from going there. We were then shown a file of a little boy who is five, turning six next month. He has nothing in his file in the way of diagnosis except a type of delay which is typical of children in orphanages and no surprise to us. His file also said he has issues with his adonoids (no big deal). We were so happy to be shown his file! He has an older brother who was adopted by a Ukrainian family. The other files then shown to us were of children who were either very sick or of sibling groups beyond our age range. Needless to say, we are pumped up about meeting this dear boy! We will travel on Friday to the Crimea region (very southern part of Ukraine) to Simferopol to meet him at his orphanage. We will travel by plane since the train ride is about 12 hours, although we might end up traveling back to Ukraine by train just because of the expense.

We asked the Lord for clarification as to who we should visit and we thank Him for making it crystal clear that we should meet this five year old boy. We had no question in our appointment as to whether we should do this or do that - His will for us at this leg of the journey is very clear to us and we just put one foot in front of the other and take the next good step that He's leading us to take. We hope and pray for a good meeting with him on Friday and then we'll go from there. If that goes well, we will have Dr. Yuri exam and assess him for his input.

Lastly, a few months back we felt lead to have an addendum done to our homestudy that changed our age range from 0-4 years old to 0-6 years old. How thankful we are that this was done. If we end up adopting this boy, he falls right in our updated age range and the addendum saves us a lot of hassle and headache on our end over in Ukraine.

Thanks to all for your support and prayers along the way. We appreciate and love you all! Thanks too for your emails and comments to our blog - we are able to read them - and they make the world seem much smaller.